At the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, NYC, Yohji Yamamoto and Danh Vo Receive the 2026 Isamu Noguchi Award

The Noguchi Museum in Long Island City held its annual benefit on Tuesday, October 6, and presented the thirteenth Isamu Noguchi Award to fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto and artist Danh Vo. The benefit is the museum's most important fundraiser. It supports exhibitions, education, care for the world's largest collection of Noguchi's work, and the preservation of his archives and spaces.

Established in 2014, the award honors accomplished people from any discipline who share Noguchi's spirit of innovation, unbounded imagination and commitment to creativity. It also recognizes work marked by fearless experimentation, cross-cultural dialogue and social consciousness. Past honorees include Tadao Ando, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Rei Kawakubo. This year coincides with the 75th anniversary of Akari, Noguchi's light sculptures.

Yamamoto founded Y's in 1972 and showed his first Yohji Yamamoto runway collection in Paris in 1981. Known as the "poet of black," he has rejected conventional ideas of fit, proportion and gender. His work reaches into Y-3 with adidas, launched in 2002, costumes for Takeshi Kitano's films, a Wagner opera and a Pina Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal performance. The museum says his distilling of past forms into futuristic ones echoes Noguchi's ideal of the "true development" of craft traditions. Born in Tokyo in 1943, he works in Tokyo and Paris. According to ArtAsiaPacific, he said in his remarks that Noguchi created a language that opened a space between East and West.

Vo was born in 1975 in Bà Rịa, Vietnam, and lives and works at his studio and farm, Güldenhof, in rural Germany. Over the past decade he has built a sustained dialogue with Noguchi: "Noguchi for Danh Vo: Counterpoint" at the M+ Pavilion in Hong Kong and "Take My Breath Away" at SMK in Copenhagen (both 2018), a show at Mudam Luxembourg, an exhibition at Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice, and most recently "Danh Vo in Situ: Akari by Noguchi" at M+.

Director Amy Hau and Board Chair Susan Kessler led the ceremony, and Satoshi Katahira, Consul General of Japan in New York, offered remarks. Each honoree was introduced with a short film by Alex Meillier and Matthew Laumb. Guests had cocktails in the sculpture garden and first-floor galleries, then dined, catered by BITE, in the second-floor galleries. The rooms were lit by Akari and decorated with floral designs by Eriko Nagata Floral Studio. A silent auction featured two Noguchi works, Octetra and Play Sculpture.