Isamu Noguchi: Transnational Icon - Dakin Hart, Senior Curator

Join us for a free virtual talk with Dakin Hart, Senior Curator of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum. Presented in collaboration with The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Japan-United States Friendship Commission and National Association of Japan America Societies, “Isamu Noguchi: Transnational Icon” will focus on the Noguchi Museum, which holds the world’s largest and most extensive collection of Isamu Noguchi’s sculptures, drawings, models, and designs.

Register for the webinar through the Nelson-Atkins website:

https://cart.nelson-atkins.org/29001/32073

Dakin Hart asserts that hybridity was the hallmark of Noguchi's life and work. Biracial, he set out to make himself a one-world human culture bridge, a term his great friend the futurist R. Buckminster Fuller might have used. The extraordinary thing about Noguchi's perspective—which is how he described his artistic practice, believing more in society than art and not at all in style—is its openness. Though frequently pigeonholed as a cultural ambassador between Japan and the United States, he didn't believe he belonged to either, and when it came to selecting his own mentors, to some extent representing East and West, he chose to apprentice with the Chinese painter Qi Baishi in Beijing, and Constantin Brancusi, a Romanian folk artist, in Paris. Noguchi's conception of East and West was not of polar opposites, but rather complementary, world-circling bands that at least in him continuously overlapped.