The Noguchi Museum, chartered as The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, is a museum and sculpture garden in the Long Island City section of Queens, New York City, designed and created by the Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988). Opening on a limited basis to the public in 1985, the museum and foundation were intended to preserve and display Noguchi's sculptures, architectural models, stage designs, drawings, and furniture designs. The two-story, 24,000 square feet (2,200 m2) museum and sculpture garden, one block from the Socrates Sculpture Park, underwent major renovations in 2004 allowing the museum to stay open year-round.
Isamu Noguchi was an American artist and landscape architect whose artistic career spanned six decades, from the 1920s onward. Known for his sculpture and public artworks, Noguchi also designed stage sets for various Martha Graham productions, and several mass-produced lamps and furniture pieces, some of which are still manufactured and sold.
John Kirk Train Varnedoe was an American art historian, the chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) from 1988 to 2001, Professor of the History of Art at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and Professor of Fine Arts at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts.
Alison Saar is a Los Angeles, California based sculptor, mixed-media, and installation artist. Her artwork focuses on the African diaspora and black female identity and is influenced by African, Caribbean, and Latin American folk art and spirituality. Saar is well known for "transforming found objects to reflect themes of cultural and social identity, history, and religion."
Peter Shelton is a contemporary American sculptor born in 1951 in Troy, Ohio.
Michelle Stuart is an American multidisciplinary artist known for her sculpture, painting and environmental art. She is based in New York City.
Jean Shin is an American artist living in Brooklyn, NY. She is known for creating elaborate sculptures and site-specific installations using accumulated cast-off materials.
Miya Ando is an American visual artist recognized for her paintings, sculptures, and installation artworks that address concepts of temporality, interdependence, and impermanence. Ando's artworks have been exhibited in museums, galleries, and public spaces worldwide.
Nancy Rubins is an American sculptor and installation artist. Her sculptural works are primarily composed of blooming arrangements of large rigid objects such as televisions, small appliances, camping and construction trailers, hot water heaters, mattresses, airplane parts, rowboats, kayaks, canoes, surfboards, and other objects. Works such as Big Edge at CityCenter in Las Vegas contain over 200 boat vessels. Stainless Steel, Aluminum, Monochrome I, Built to Live Anywhere, at Home Here, at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, contains 66 used aluminum boats and rises to a height of 30 ft.
Ronald Bladen was a Canadian-born American painter and sculptor. He is particularly known for his large-scale sculptures. His artistic stance, was influenced by European Constructivism, American Hard-Edge Painting, and sculptors such as Isamu Noguchi and David Smith. Bladen in turn had stimulating effect on a circle of younger artists including Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt and others, who repeatedly referred to him as one of the 'father figures' of Minimal Art.
Rachel Lachowicz is an American artist based in Los Angeles, California. She is primarily recognized for appropriating canonical works by modern and contemporary male artists such as Carl Andre and Richard Serra and recreating them using red lipstick.
Liz Larner is an American installation artist and sculptor living and working in Los Angeles.
Renée Petropoulos is a contemporary artist who currently lives and works in Venice, California.
Cynthia Carlson is an American visual artist, living and working in New York.
Joyce J. Scott is an African-American artist, sculptor, quilter, performance artist, installation artist, print-maker, lecturer and educator. Named a MacArthur Fellow in 2016, and a Smithsonian Visionary Artist in 2019, Scott is best known for her figurative sculptures and jewelry using free form, off-loom beadweaving techniques, similar to a peyote stitch. Each piece is often constructed using thousands of glass seed beads or pony beads, and sometimes other found objects or materials such as glass, quilting and leather. In 2018, she was hailed for working in new medium — a mixture of soil, clay, straw, and cement — for a sculpture meant to disintegrate and return to the earth. Scott is influenced by a variety of diverse cultures, including Native American and African traditions, Mexican, Czech, and Russian beadwork, illustration and comic books, and pop culture.
Mary Miss is an American artist and designer. Her work has crossed boundaries between architecture, landscape architecture, engineering and urban design. Her installations are collaborative in nature: she has worked with scientists, historians, designers, and public administrators. She is primarily interested in how to engage the public in decoding their surrounding environment.
Maren Hassinger is an African-American artist and educator whose career spans four decades. Hassinger uses sculpture, film, dance, performance art, and public art to explore the relationship between the natural world and industrial materials. She incorporates everyday materials in her art, like wire rope, plastic bags, branches, dirt, newspaper, garbage, leaves, and cardboard boxes. Hassinger has stated that her work “focuses on elements, or even problems—social and environmental—that we all share, and in which we all have a stake…. I want it to be a humane and humanistic statement about our future together.”
Françoise Grossen is a textile artist known for her braided and knotted rope sculptures. She lives and works in New York City. Grossen’s work has been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; and the State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia.
Meg Webster is an American artist from San Francisco working primarily in sculpture and installation art. While her works span multiple media, she is most well known for her artworks that feature natural elements. She is closely affiliated with Post-Minimalism and the Land Art movement and has been exhibiting her work since 1980.
Jane ("Jenny") Hoadley Dixon is an American arts administrator. Dixon has undertaken initiatives which contributed to the development of four New York City cultural organizations—the Public Art Fund, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum. Her work has also focused on individual artists as vital contributors to society. Dixon is currently Director Emerita of the Noguchi Museum and Trustee Emerita of the Public Art Fund.
