Isamu Noguchi on top of Slide Mantra at Isamu Noguchi: What is Sculpture?, Venice Biennale, June 29–September 28, 1986 (Photo: Shigeo Anzai)
Founded by celebrated sculptor Isamu Noguchi, the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum is revisiting one of the artist’s most daring and debated exhibitions with Light and Stone: Revisiting Noguchi’s 1986 Venice Biennale, on view now through September 13, 2026. The archival exhibition commemorates the fortieth anniversary of Noguchi’s groundbreaking presentation at the 1986 Venice Biennale, where he became the first solo artist to represent the United States in the U.S. Pavilion. Continue reading Light and Stone: Revisiting Isamu Noguchi’s Radical Vision of Sculpture→
For many artists working in the 1960s and ’70s, ideas often superseded the physical making of art. These ideas were typically ideological, structural, and philosophical in nature and conveyed in the form of words, grids, and graphs. By the 1980s, Thomas Schütte and other artists ushered in a return to representation, which some critics described as a response to a “hunger for images.“ Around this time, cherries, watermelon, and other kinds of comestibles became motifs in his work. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Thomas Schütte, Melonely→
American artist Robert Gober (b. 1954) meticulously hand-makes his objects rather than purchasing them. Often, he and his team of studio assistants will use traditional art-making techniques or materials. The aim is not to imitate an object exactly, but to create a sensation of something recognizable yet strange. Such is the case with Dog Bed (1986–87).
To make this quilt, Rosie Lee Tompkins (1936 – 2006) drew on many techniques developed by Black women quilters in the American South who blended West African textile traditions, European patterning, and individual improvisation in their art.
One of the pioneers of Conceptual art, Sol LeWitt gave primacy to the originating idea of a work of art rather than to its execution. LeWitt had been developing these ideas in three-dimensional objects he called “structures.” Based on the unit of an open, rather than solid, cube, the works peel away what he perceived as the decorative skin on traditional sculpture, revealing their underlying skeleton, or structure. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Sol LeWitt, Five Towers→
