The Radio Nurse was the first electronic baby monitor. Manufactured by the Zenith Radio Corporation, it went on sale in 1938. The product was developed by Zenith executive Eugene F. McDonald, and designed by Japanese-American sculptor and product designer Isamu Noguchi. Although the product was manufactured for only a few years, it has been acclaimed for its design. It is still in demand as a collectible and is in many museum collections.
The product commonly called the Radio Nurse consisted of two components, the Radio Nurse Receiver and the Guardian Ear Transmitter. Noguchi designed the Radio Nurse Receiver, which was made from a dark colored Bakelite in a streamlined modernist form. The Guardian Ear Transmitter was a more utilitarian design, and was made from enameled metal. [1]
The Radio Nurse was Noguchi's first major design commission and he called it "my only strictly industrial design" [2] The product encountered technical problems because it shared a radio frequency with other new consumer technologies including car radios and garage door openers." [3]
Although the Radio Nurse has commonly been described as a baby monitor, an early Zenith advertisement mentioned invalids as well as infants, and featured an illustration of an elderly woman as well as a baby. This ad appeared in Hygeia, a popular magazine published by the American Medical Association. [4]
In 1938, the Radio Nurse was included in an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. [5] In its review of the show, Time said, "Most exotic: Isamu Noguchi's Radio Nurse, a grilled bakelite face—prettier as a radio than as a nurse." [6]
Design historians Charlotte and Peter Fiell wrote that the Radio Nurse "displayed a remarkably refined synthesis of form and function". [7] The Encyclopedia of Interior Design said that the Radio Nurse has a "strangely comforting watchful quality". [2] Smithsonian magazine wrote that "It sits like a dark, faceless plastic mask, more like a prototype for a Star Wars film." [3] On Antiques Roadshow, appraiser Gary Piattoni said, "What's significant about this piece is the design. It's an excellent example of modern design by a very famous Japanese-American designer called Isamu Noguchi." [8]
Reflecting on the attention he received, Noguchi wrote in his autobiography, "By a curious switch, I thought of commercial art as less contaminated than one that appealed to vanity." [9]
The Radio Nurse is included in the collections of many American museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, [10] the Henry Ford Museum, [11] the Museum of Modern Art, [12] the Noguchi Museum, [13] the Cooper Hewitt, [14] the Oakland Museum of California, [15] the Yale University Art Gallery, [1] and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. [16] It is also part of the collections of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, [17] the Victoria and Albert Museum in London [18] and the M+ museum under construction in Hong Kong. [19]
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.
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A baby monitor, also known as a baby alarm, is a radio system used to remotely listen to sounds made by an infant. An audio monitor consists of a transmitter unit, equipped with a microphone, placed near to the child. It transmits the sounds by radio waves to a receiver unit with a speaker carried by, or near to, the person caring for the infant. Some baby monitors provide two-way communication which allows the parent to speak back to the baby. Some allow music to be played to the child. A monitor with a video camera and receiver is often called a baby cam.
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Sinai is a public artwork by the Japanese American artist Isamu Noguchi, located at the Lynden Sculpture Garden, which is near Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States. Sinai is a cast-iron sculpture measuring 36 inches (910 mm) high, 21 inches (530 mm) wide, and 11 inches (280 mm) deep. It is part of a series of work created between the 1967 and 1969, during which time Noguchi was collaborating with the Japanese stone carver Masatoshi Izumi.
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Leo Amino was a Japanese-American sculptor known for his Abstract Expressionist sculptures created with a variety of materials, including wood, wire, and plastics.
Saburō Hasegawa was a Japanese calligrapher, painter, art writer, curator, and teacher. He was an early advocate of abstract art in Japan and an equally vocal supporter of the Japanese traditional arts and Zen Buddhism. Throughout his career he argued for the connection between East Asian classical arts and Western abstract painting.
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.
Amy Lyford is an American professor of art history. She is on the faculty of Occidental College in Los Angeles, California. A specialist in Modern Art, Lyford is the author of two books: Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post-World War I Reconstruction in France and Isamu Noguchi’s Modernism: Negotiating Race, Labor, and Nation, 1930-1950.
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Zenith Radio Nurse.
What's significant about this piece is the design. It's an excellent example of modern design by a very famous Japanese-American designer called Isamu Noguchi.
The highly sculptural form evokes an abstracted human head: the eponymous surrogate nurse.
The case is deep brown molded Bakelite and designed to suggest the head and hat of a nurse.
Its shape suggests both traditional Japanese Kendo masks and American 'machine age' sculpture of the 1930s. In 1939 it was displayed at the Whitney Museum of American Art's annual sculpture exhibition, where Time magazine called it the 'most exotic' exhibit in the show, 'prettier as a radio than as a nurse'.