2021 Benefit Auction

The Noguchi Museum’s Benefit auction raises funds to support the Museum’s operations, collection, and programming. This year, eight unique Akari light sculptures customized by artist Leonard McGurr (FUTURA2000), featured in the Museum’s 2020–21 exhibition Futura Akari, are offered. Bidding will close during the Benefit on Tuesday, October 5, at 9 pm ET.

If you are interested in receiving more information, please contact benefit@noguchi.org or 718.204.7088 ext 221.

Auction on OneCause

Artworks 

Futura Akari

From November 11, 2020, to April 25, 2021, The Noguchi Museum presented Futura Akari, which exhibited a group of Akari light sculptures designed by Isamu Noguchi from 1952–86 and hand painted by FUTURA2000 in 2020. 

When retail sales of his Akari lanterns began in 1952, lsamu Noguchi (1904–1988) was already well into his career-long effort to remake sculpture into “a vital force in our everyday life.” Akari were conceived to function as miniature suns: sources of life and local generators of the environmental situation we call home. In doing so, they have become among the most transformative, ubiquitous, and influential sculptures ever devised. Like so much of what Noguchi produced operating in nature’s wake, they seem to be impervious to taste and fashion: their natural phenomenon-like universality making them limitlessly adaptable.

In recognition of the desire Akari inspire in so many people to contribute creatively to what Noguchi called their “self-generative cycle,” the Museum invited FUTURA2000––New York-born action painter, seminal figure in the history and culture of graffiti, and, like Noguchi, an open-to-the-world boundary-crosser––to hand paint a group of them. Futura’s early moves into gallery painting in the 1980s, when he still didn’t consider himself an artist, just happen to have coincided with Noguchi’s final efforts to put Akari at the center of his sculptural legacy. 

We were honored to show the products of Futura’s after-the-fact collaboration with Noguchi in the expanded field of artmaking in our exhibition Futura Akari in 2020–21. We are grateful to Futura for this ongoing collaboration, and for his generosity in joining us to make these available in support of the Museum.

Dakin Hart
Senior Curator 

About FUTURA2000

Radical from the genesis of his career, Leonard McGurr / FUTURA2000 (b. 1955) has been compared to Wassily Kandinsky for his mastery of color, geometric composition, and line—and is celebrated alongside his friends Dondi White and Rammellzee for his progressiveness and of-the-moment dynamism. Futura’s creativity—articulated across canvas, paper, sculpture, photography, graphic design, and large-scale mural work—shines as a result of its kinetic composition, elemental quality, and fully-original gestures.

His work has been exhibited at notable art institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles; MoMA PS1, the New Museum, and the seminal Fun Gallery in New York; as well as, most recently, the Beyond the Streets exhibitions in Los Angeles (2018) and New York (2019). As an artist who also has a dedicated commercial practice and product brand (Futura Laboratories), he has collaborated with partners such as Louis Vuitton, COMME des GARÇONS, Chanel, Nike, Off-White and Levis; he has also designed iconic album packaging for musicians such as The Clash, and DJ performance visuals for Virgil Abloh.