Two public art displays are just a block away from each other in Lower Manhattan \u2014 both the work of renowned Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi.<\/p>\n
They are the Red Cube at 140 Broadway and Liberty Street and the Sunken Garden at Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza in Lower Manhattan.<\/p>\n
What You Need To Know<\/p>\n
Noguchi’s New York is a new exhibition at the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, Queens
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It focuses on the relationship between the renowned Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi and NYC
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The museum is celebrating its 40th anniversary\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople can be walking though it all the time and not realize it was Isamu Noguchi, so it\u2019s wonderful just to remind people of the ideas that he had and the wonderful art that surrounds us,\u201d said Amy Hau, director of the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, Queens.<\/p>\n
Hau was Noguchi\u2019s longtime assistant and became director two years ago.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Noguchi\u2019s relationship with the city is the focus of Noguchi\u2019s New York, a new exhibit at the museum he established 40 years ago.<\/p>\n
Noguchi first moved here in 1922 at the age of 17, and it would always be a place he considered home until his death in 1988.<\/p>\n
\u201cIsamu traveled a lot. I think most people who know of him think of him as an itinerant artist. He traveled everywhere, but New York was always his home base,\u201d Hau said.<\/p>\n
The exhibition includes sculptures and models for projects, including proposals for playgrounds that never came to fruition, with a series of animated videos showing how children may have used them.<\/p>\n
Another possibility that never happened \u2014 designing play equipment for apes at the Bronx Zoo.<\/p>\n
There are more than 50 works, including his early portrait busts of friends and colleagues, and a stage set for a Martha Graham dance production.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s all inside a museum that began as a way to provide more space for his studio, and wound up as what he called a gift to the city.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are just so proud here in Queens that he not only established the beginnings of a very wonderful collection, but giving it to the city in this way as a museum for all of us to enjoy,\u201d Hau said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As Noguchi once said, \u201cI\u2019m really a New Yorker. There\u2019s no way out but to say that I\u2019m just a New Yorker.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n