Isamu Noguchi American, 1904-1988

Isamu Noguchi was an acclaimed American sculptor, furniture designer, and landscape architect. Throughout his innovative work, he experimented with biomorphic forms to create unexpected aesthetic combinations, as seen in his iconic Noguchi table (1947). Born on November 17, 1904 in Los Angeles, CA, he was the illegitimate son of the Japanese poet Yone Noguchi and the respected American editor and journalist Léonie Gilmour. He spent much of his time growing up in Japan with his mother, where he apprenticed a local carpenter. Noguchi then worked with the sculptor Constantin Brancusi in Paris for seven months before returning to the United States to pursue his art career. One of his most famed public installations is Red Cube (1968), a massive steel sculpture that balances on a single corner in a Manhattan Plaza. In 1985, Noguchi opened The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in Long Island City, NY across from his studio, which today operates as a museum. Today, his works can be found in the collections of the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others. Noguchi died on November 30, 1988 in New York, NY.