Museum of Stones

In the last decade of his life, internationally renowned artist Isamu Noguchi (1904 1988) converted his industrial studio warehouse in New York into an open-air sculpture garden and gallery-thus creating The Noguchi Museum. An intimate, reflective space in which to experience Noguchi’s sculpture and design, it fulfils a vision that the artist deemed essential to his life’s work. On the occasion of its thirtieth anniversary, Museum of Stones presents the first installation of contemporary artists’ work throughout The Noguchi Museum. Its focus on stone, a subject and medium that very much occupied Noguchi, is fitting. Featuring over one hundred works by nearly forty artists, including Mel Bochner, Dove Bradshaw, Jimmie Durham, Yoko Ono, Gabriel Orozco, Keith Sonnier and Toshiko Takaezu, as well as examples of Paleolithic handaxes and Chinese scholars’ rocks, Museum of Stones introduces new dialogues between Noguchi’s treatment and presentation of stones and those of ancient and contemporary artists. AUTHOR: Jenny Dixon is director of The Noguchi Museum. Dakin Hart is senior curator of The Noguchi Museum. He is the coauthor of Mark Grotjahn: Masks (2015) and a contributor to Picasso Mosqueteros: The Late Works 1962 1972 (2009).
Matt Kirsch is associate curator at The Noguchi Museum, where he has curated many in-house and traveling exhibitions, including Noguchi as Photographer: The Jantar Mantars of Northern India (2015).
Joseph Scheier-Dolberg is assistant curator in the Department of Asian Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and a PhD candidate at Columbia University, where he is writing a dissertation on the Qing dynasty portrait painter Yu Zhiding (1646 1716).
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