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Isamu Noguchi’s Tenth Street Studio, Long Island City, c. 1960s. Photo: Noguchi Museum Archive.
Isamu Noguchi’s Tenth Street Studio, Long Island City, c. 1960s. Photo: Noguchi Museum Archive.

Noguchi Museum to Expand with New Building, Restored Studio

The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in Long Island City, New York, announced today its plans to create an expanded campus to increase public access to the institution’s permanent collection, exhibitions, and public programming. The original 27,000-square-foot gallery space and sculpture garden, established by Noguchi in 1985, will remain, while a new 6,000-square-foot building will be designed by Büro Koray Duman to house the museum’s collection and archives. The institution plans to renovate the sculptor’s original 1959 studio and apartment building, which it predicts will open to the public for the first time starting in 2022.

Noguchi Museum board chair Malcolm Nolen said in a statement: “Following a ten-plus-year project to stabilize the Noguchi Museum building and sculpture garden, we are thrilled to be taking the necessary steps both to ensure the safety of our collections of Noguchi’s art and archival materials and to increase public access to them. As the guardians of the life’s work of one of the greatest sculptors and designers of the twentieth century, whose legacy continues to inspire artists, scholars, and the public, the museum must work not only to safeguard the art and archives, but also to make them accessible.”

Brett Littman, the institution’s new director, added: “Isamu Noguchi was a fearless, category-defying, cross-disciplinary polymath, and our new Noguchi campus will allow us to better reflect on the complex nature of Noguchi’s work and life.” 

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