Born into a family of stone carvers in the town of Mure on the Japanese island of Shikoku, Masatoshi Izumi was the fabricator for Isamu Noguchi on the artist’s late stone sculpture. Izumi began working with stone in 1953, and in 1964 he co-founded the Stone Atelier in Kagawa Prefecture, dedicated to new architectural and artistic uses of traditional stone cutting techniques. That year he also met Isamu Noguchi, who in 1966 asked Izumi to assist him with the carving of the monumental granite sculpture Black Sun, completed in 1969 for the Seattle Art Museum. Izumi subsequently developed a studio complex in Mure for Isamu Noguchi. In addition to his twenty-two year association with Isamu Noguchi, Masatoshi Izumi and his colleagues realized some of the most ambitious architectural stone projects in Japan.