As you enter the High Museum’s latest exhibition, “Isamu Noguchi: ‘I am not a designer,'” a small placard at the entrance poses a question to carry through the galleries: Was Noguchi indeed a designer, despite his proclamations to the contrary?
The answer, the show makes clear, is no. The case the retrospective makes — through nearly 200 objects spanning architecture, industrial design, ceramics, furniture, lighting, stage sets and landscape design — is that Noguchi approached everything he created from the perspective of an artist. Purpose and usability mattered to him, but they were always in service of expression. And what the exhibit also makes clear is how much Noguchi’s art has shaped modern American life. My own included.
I came of age on a military base in West Texas, where an Eastern aesthetic meant samurai swords someone had brought back from a tour in Okinawa or Korea. Moving to Dallas for college felt like an arrival. And when I had the chance to furnish my first apartment, I wanted the decor to reflect that. I went to Pier One and bought a paper-lantern floor lamp. It reassured me I had a point of view, that I was sophisticated enough to recognize good design.
I didn’t know the lamp was a knockoff. I didn’t know the original had a name — or that its maker considered it, like everything else he crafted, a work of art.
A career of collaborations
“Making Multiples,” the first section of “’I am not a designer,” explores Noguchi’s forays into industrial manufacturing and his experiments with reproducibility. It opens with the Radio Nurse — a bakelite baby monitor he designed for Zenith Radio Corporation in 1937, small, dark and rounded, a now familiar silhouette that was considered radical at the time. Turn left and the room declares itself: a centerpiece grouping of Noguchi-designed coffee and side tables, a chair or two. Then, continuing around, your first introduction to the Akari paper lantern lamp.
Around the corner, a wall maps the extraordinary web of collaborators Noguchi moved through over his career. The breadth of it is the argument. He was not a man with a specialty. He was an artist who went wherever the muse moved him.
Galleries of movement
But it was the gallery devoted to Noguchi’s collaboration with Chicago dancer and choreographer Ruth Page — his one-time lover and artistic partner — that stopped me cold. It features the sculpture “Miss Expanding Universe” (1932), a gleaming aluminum suspension figure radiating her limbs outward, hanging alongside the blue jersey sack costume Noguchi designed for Page to wear in performance. I grew up in the Black Baptist church. My sister once led the praise dance troupe. I recognized that silhouette — and the figure above it — from the pulpits and stages of my youth.
Further into the exhibit, in an alcove devoted to Noguchi’s five-decade collaboration with choreographer Martha Graham, stands “Seraphic Dialogue” (1955), a brass rod-and-steel-wire structure evocative of an altar. “This set is only effective with light — moods to be varied by changing intensities between the various elements,” Noguchi wrote in his notes on the set. Standing before it, you see how Noguchi viewed a dancer’s body in motion and his sculptures as the same conversation, held in different materials.
Play as art
I heard it the moment I stepped off the elevator into the exhibition: Children’s voices. Screaming, shrieking. I stopped. My heart stopped. A sign of the times, perhaps. Then it registered. Those were sounds of pure joy. A gallery attendant promised all would be revealed.
It was.
In the second-to-last gallery is a large, red-painted, steel Noguchi play piece. Signs encourage you to sit. Oversized screens surround the piece, projecting images and audio designed to mimic the experience of playing in a city park. The screams. The shrieks. The pure joy. That gallery turned out to be my favorite room in the exhibition.
Shaping memories
The final gallery of “I am not a designer” belongs to Atlanta.
In 1973, a High Museum volunteer named Frankie Coxe proposed building a children’s playground that was also a work of art. Noguchi was always the first choice. He visited Piedmont Park in the fall of 1975 and completed the designs for Playscapes by December. It opened in May 1976, Noguchi’s first playground built in the United States during his lifetime.
The final gallery holds a large-scale architectural model of Playscapes at its center. A panoramic photograph of the playground’s climbable blocks, asymmetric swings, its swirling painted-steel slide spans the wall behind it. Sketches, footage, and a photograph by celebrated Atlanta photographer Lucinda Bunnen, taken at the playground’s 1976 opening, complete the installation.
My son is 18 now. When he was small, Piedmont Park was his kingdom. The Noguchi Playscape a favored territory. He loved playing King of the Hill and driving cars on the playground’s central mound. And shrieking down the triple slides. I never once considered, across all those play days, that Isamu Noguchi had sculpted those hours of happiness, the same way he sculpted Red Cube.
That is the exhibition’s quiet argument: Noguchi was not a designer. He was an artist who designed much of our modern life. We just needed a reminder.
“Isamu Noguchi: ‘I am not a designer’” runs through Aug. 2 at the High Museum of Art.
