NOGUCHI:  THE BOLLINGEN JOURNEY
Photographs and Drawings 1949-1965

February 13, 2003 through October 13, 2003
Curated by Bonnie Rychlak

Isamu Noguchi is well-known as a prolific sculptor and a gifted designer of furniture, stage sets, and public spaces, but he was also an enthusiastic photographer and indefatigable traveler. Noguchi: The Bollingen Journey, puts on view, for the first time, over a hundred photographs and drawings Noguchi produced between 1949 and 1956 as he traveled and worked his way twice around the world; backtracking to certain places several times. He compiled images and ideas for a book about the "environments of leisure" and documented sources of spiritual inspiration and formal invention that would inform his work for years to come. The Bollingen Foundation, established by Paul and Mary Conover Mellon, provided Noguchi with the funding for these travels and a publication venue for his manuscript and documentation, but the book was never completed.

As most of the modern art world in New York (in which Noguchi was a serious participant) turned inward and focused its attention and energy on the solitary work of the artist in the studio, Noguchi turned outward and focused his attention on the "creative arenas" of other cultures.

He began the first of his extended travel odysseys at the pre-historic caves of France then worked his way through Italy, Spain, Greece, Egypt, India, Sri Lanka (Ceylon), Bali, Thailand (Siam), Cambodia, and Japan; studying the monumental, the classical, the communal and spiritual spaces and structures of each society. On his later trips he re-visited many sites in addition to investigating other places in England, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Nepal.

Though Noguchi was ostensibly investigating "environments of leisure" during his travels, he made a significant amount of work that actively engaged him with the countries he visited. In India he sculpted a portrait head of Nehru and designed a memorial to Gandhi. While in post-war Japan he designed and realized his first garden and first complete interior space as well as contributing a bridge design to the ravaged city of Hiroshima. In Gifu, Japan, he helped revitalize the traditional lamp-making craft with his own designs of Akari that are still in production today.

This exhibit loosely traces Noguchi's travel itineraries and presents a combination of the photographs, drawings, objects, and writings that were the result of his creative, multiculturally informed, photo-documenting, noriadic journey of a half-century ago.