2022 Benefit and Isamu Noguchi Award

November 17, 2022

Silla Brush, Thaddeus Mosley holding Isamu Noguchi Award statues, with museum director Brett Littman
2022 Isamu Noguchi Award honoree Thaddeus Mosley (center), Silla Brush (left) accepting on behalf of 2022 Isamu Noguchi Award honoree Daniel Brush, Noguchi Museum director Brett Littman (right). Photo: Don Stahl. ©INFGM / ARS

On Thursday, November 17, the 118th anniversary of Isamu Noguchi’s birth, The Noguchi Museum held its Fall Benefit and presentation of the 2022 Isamu Noguchi Award to artists Daniel Brush and Thaddeus Mosley.

The celebration began with a lively cocktail reception in the permanent installation galleries and special exhibition In Praise of Caves: Organic Architecture Projects from Mexico by Carlos Lazo, Mathias Goeritz, Juan O’Gorman, and Javier Senosiain, followed by the Isamu Noguchi Award ceremony in the Noguchi-designed ‘floating gallery’ on the second floor. Introduced by Museum director Brett Littman and board chair Malcolm Nolen, the ceremony featured original short films (produced by Alex Meillier, Ager Meillier Films Inc.) highlighting the honorees’ work and careers, and heartfelt remarks given by honoree Thaddeus Mosley and by Silla Brush, who accepted the award on behalf of his father, honoree Daniel Brush

Guests were then invited to dinner across the street in Isamu Noguchi’s former studio, which was aglow with Noguchi’s Akari light sculptures and featured autumnal floral arrangements by Eriko Nagata, EriN Design International, incorporating ceramic works by local artists based out of the Long Island City studio Sculpture Space NYC (Jim Brown, Magda Dejose, Shane Gabier, Andrew Kennedy, Jeongyeon K. Lim, Miwa Neishi, Shinwon. Yoon). Also featured in the space were hanging textiles by Liam Lee. Dinner was created by Bite.

The Noguchi Museum’s annual benefit raises essential funds to support its exhibitions, research, and programming, and the care of its renowned collection.


Several of the artworks from Sculpture Space NYC artists and Liam Lee are still available for purchase through Wednesday, November 30. Proceeds directly support the artists and the Museum. Inquiries can be made to Evan Scott, manager of retail and merchandising, at escott@noguchi.org.

View Available Works

For more information about supporting the Benefit, contact Melissa Gatz at benefit@noguchi.org or 718.204.7088 ext 229. To make a fully tax-deductible gift in support of The Noguchi Museum in any amount, give what you can here.

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The Isamu Noguchi Award

Established in 2014, the Isamu Noguchi Award honors the tenets that Noguchi expressed in his life’s work and acknowledges highly accomplished individuals who reflect similar ideals in their own times. The Award thus celebrates innovation, global awareness, and Eastern and Western cultural exchange.

2022 Honorees

Daniel Brush

Film by Alex Meillier, Ager Meillier Films Inc.
Portrait by Nathan Crooker

Daniel Brush

Daniel Brush (b. 1947, Cleveland, OH) has created an unparalleled body of work over the last five decades, working in virtual seclusion from the mainstream. His large-scale canvases and drawings integrate expressive, disciplined gestures inspired by the Noh theater with the removed drama in modernist painting. Brush’s three-dimensional works include delicate granulated gold domes in the traditions of the ancient goldsmiths, jewel-encrusted objects of virtue and fantasy, and gold and steel sculptures, some only a few inches high. His current wall pieces in blued steel and pure gold engage the ambient light. Brush’s table works in stainless steel and pure gold, hand-engraved with thousands of rhythmic lines, are visual poems that record the passage of time. Daniel Brush has developed a rigorous personal aesthetic marked by its intellectual force and the science of materials. Brush has had solo exhibitions at the Phillips Collection, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Renwick Gallery of the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, the Lannan Foundation, the Arkansas Art Museum, the Des Moines Art Center, and the University of Massachusetts Art Gallery at Amherst, and he has since participated in international competitions, including the International Festival of Contemporary Drawing at the Grand Palais Paris. Daniel Brush: Blue Steel Gold Light (2012–13) at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, was the first exhibition to comprehensively review the full spectrum of his creative output. Brush’s work is in the public collections of the American Art Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Phillips Collection, and the Victoria & Albert Museum, among others, as well as in private and royal collections, including the collections of Van Cleef & Arpels and Boucheron. danielbrush.com

 

Thaddeus Mosley

Film by Alex Meillier, Ager Meillier Films Inc.
Portrait by Jason Schmidt / courtesy Karma and Thaddeus Mosley

Thaddeus Mosley

Thaddeus Mosley (b. 1926, New Castle, PA) is a Pittsburgh-based, self-taught artist whose monumental sculptures are crafted with the felled trees of Pittsburgh’s urban canopy, via the city’s Forestry Division. Using only a mallet and chisel, Mosley reworks salvaged timber into biomorphic forms. With influences ranging from Isamu Noguchi to Constantin Brâncuși—and the Bamum, Dogon, Baoulé, Senufo, Dan, and Mossi works of his personal collection—Mosley’s sculptures mark an inflection point in the history of American abstraction. These “sculptural improvisations,” as he calls them, take cues from the modernist traditions of jazz. “The only way you can really achieve something is if you’re not working so much from a pattern. That’s also the essence of good jazz,” Mosley says of his method. Mosley was commissioned for the 2020 edition of Frieze Sculpture at Rockefeller Center, New York, and his work has been exhibited and acquired by major museums and foundations since 1959, including the Mattress Factory Museum and the Carnegie Museum of Art, both in Pittsburgh, for the occasion of the 57th Edition of the Carnegie International (2018). His work is held in public collections including the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York, New York; and the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine. His traveling solo exhibition, Forest, is currently on view at Art+Practice, Los Angeles (through January 21, 2023). The show traveled from the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, and will continue on to the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas. karmakarma.org/artists/thaddeus-mosley

 

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Isamu Noguchi Award Honorees