Light and Stone: Revisiting Noguchi's 1986 Venice Biennale at The Noguchi Museum

The Noguchi Museum in Long Island City is showing Light and Stone: Revisiting Noguchi's 1986 Venice Biennale through May 9, 2027. It marks forty years since Isamu Noguchi became the first solo artist to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. Drawing on the Museum's own collection and archive, the show fills a single gallery, Area 5 on the first floor.

The 1986 presentation, titled What Is Sculpture?, was organized under Commissioner Alanna Heiss, founder of MoMA PS1, and curated by Henry Geldzahler, formerly of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was Noguchi's first major showing in Europe, and it puzzled critics by blurring the lines between art, design and environment. It did not win the Golden Lion.

At its heart stood Slide Mantra, a ten-foot marble spiral slide set in the courtyard of the U.S. Pavilion. It expressed Noguchi's long belief that play is an essential human experience, and it was shown beside cast-bronze models of playground proposals, unbuilt, that reached back to the 1930s. Large stone and steel works were included, along with a prominent group of Akari light sculptures. Geldzahler and other close peers warned that Akari's commercial associations would invite criticism, but Noguchi kept them in. Monumentality against lightness, tradition against technology, abstraction against function: he set these pairs in tension, and his movement between East and West worked as a sculptural method rather than a question of identity.

Light and Stone brings together archival photographs, architectural sketches, a model for Slide Mantra and Akari, along with a draft of Noguchi's 1985 statement for the Biennale. Some of the unrealized playground and earthwork models shown in Venice can also be seen in Noguchi's New York, in the second-floor galleries. The exhibition is curated by Hitomi Iwasaki, Head Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs.

The show also belongs to the Museum's 2026 observance of 75 years of Akari. In 1951 the mayor of Gifu, Japan, asked Noguchi to help revive the town's lantern industry, built on mulberry-bark paper and spiral-wound bamboo. He designed electric lamps made by traditional Gifu methods in new sculptural forms, and over about three decades produced roughly 200 models.

Light and Stone is timed to the 2026 Venice Biennale, where the Museum is working with The Japan Foundation to include selected works in Ei Arakawa-Nash's participatory Japan Pavilion exhibition, Grass Babies, Moon Babies. Arakawa-Nash will lead a children's workshop built around Noguchi's works, including Akari designed for the 1986 Biennale.