Ikenobo Ikebana NYC Marks 40 Years at The Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, NYC

The Noguchi Museum in Long Island City gave its Education Studio on Level C to a two-day exhibition on October 17 and 18, marking 40 years of the Ikenobo Ikebana Society's New York City chapter. The show was free with museum admission. It ran from 11am to 6pm on Saturday and from 11am to 5pm on Sunday.

Ikenobo began in Kyoto more than 550 years ago and is regarded as the oldest and most enduring school of ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement. The exhibition drew on the school's grounding in close observation of nature, and on the way ikebana explores the relationship between plants, space, season and the human spirit.

About 45 arrangements by distinguished masters and members of the New York chapter made up the show. The featured makers included Headmaster Designate Senko Ikenobo and Professor Kobayashi, both from Japan, and Specially Entrusted Overseas Professor Noritaka Noda of New York City, along with chapter members. As part of the anniversary, Senko Ikenobo was to travel to New York and present a special arrangement.

The venue gave the show its framework. The museum set the living art of Ikenobo beside the sculpture of Isamu Noguchi, asking how nature, form and emptiness give one another meaning. Space, the exhibition argued, is shaped as much by what is absent as by what is present. Like Noguchi's work, ikebana treats balance and tension, movement and stillness, as essential parts of composition. Visitors were invited to read the flowers as sculptural expressions of time, place and attentive seeing.

The chapter describes itself as a community devoted to practicing, studying and sharing Ikenobo ikebana, with classes, exhibitions and gatherings in New York. Photographs for the exhibition were credited to Ikenobo Headquarters and Noritaka Noda. The museum's calendar also lists a related program, Mindfulness in the Galleries: Ikebana, on November 14.