Presented by Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, Noguchi’s Playscapes is the most comprehensive exhibition to date focusing on Isamu Noguchi’s vision of playgrounds and the public space. It includes models, sketches, architectural drawings and photographs, along with full-scale reconstructions of play sculptures and playscapes.

The show revisits some of Isamu Noguchi’s key ideas on how to discuss play, recreation, and education; and thus provokes a reconsideration of these categories within the sense of community that exists in our times. Embracing the possibility of closing the gap between art and functionality, Noguchi fiercely defended the idea that sculpture is an aesthetic and cultural tool capable of smoothing our passage between individuality and society. He took a favorable view of the democratization of art and the public space, inspiring him to create a number of playgrounds and play structures designed to stimulate creative activity as a way of learning about and participating in the world.

The scale models, sketches, set designs, and archival images included in this show—the first of its kind in Mexico—attest to the artist’s fifty-year-long investigation of spaces for play. The Museo Tamayo has created full-scale working reproductions of Noguchi’s play sculptures, which were last made in Japan four decades ago. Located both inside and outside the building, these will be accessible to visitors of the museum and of Chapultepec Park. To read more, visit museotamayo.org.  #LosParquesdeNoguchi