A long and winding road leads fromIsamu Noguchi’s first formal design for an environmental work, an urban playground entitled Play Mountain, 1933, to the recently completed Lillie and Hugh Roy Cullen Sculpture Garden, which he created for the Museum of Fine Arts’ sculpture collection. That ambitious project of 53 years ago exists only as an austere plaster model. Never constructed, it initiated a string of unrealized large-scale outdoor projects Noguchi conceived during the ’30s and ’40s.

By the early ’50s, however, the pattern of rejection of his proposals had begun to shift toward favorable

Every once in a while you see a museum exhibition that you know is being shown at exactly the right time in exactly the right place. “Joseph Glasco, 1948–1986,” organized by Marti Mayo for the Contemporary Arts Museum,was such a show In the first place, Glasco remains, at 61, an extraordinary abstract painter; his career harks back to the classic “15 Americans” exhibition organized by Dorothy Miller for the Museum of Modern Art in 1952, and his work was the hit above all else in the exhibition “Fresh Paint: The Houston School,” seen here and in New York last year. He is also clearly one of the