Isamu Noguchi

His father, the poet Yone Noguchi, had already proposed to another woman and sailed for Japan by the time Isamu was born in Los Angeles in November 1904, and had married a third by the time Léonie Gilmour brought their son to Yokohama in 1907. Yone was mostly absent afterward. Léonie moved the boy around Japan, had a house built at Chigasaki and put the eight-year-old in charge of overseeing the work, apprenticed him to a local carpenter, and handed him the garden. At 13 she sent him back across the Pacific alone, to school in Indiana, where he boarded with a Swedenborgian pastor and graduated from high school in 1922 under the name Sam Gilmour.

Gutzon Borglum, to whom he was apprenticed at 17, told him at the end of the summer that he would never be a sculptor, so he enrolled as a premedical student at Columbia and took night classes at the Leonardo da Vinci Art School as insurance. Three months later he had a show. He dropped medicine, took his father's surname, won a Guggenheim while three years under the age limit, and spent seven months in Paris as Brâncuși's assistant with no language in common. What followed ran across six decades and every scale: portrait busts to pay rent, Martha Graham's stage sets, the Akari paper lamps he rebuilt for the mayor of Gifu, the coffee table Herman Miller has never stopped selling, the nine-ton relief News at Rockefeller Center, sunken gardens at Yale and Chase Manhattan Plaza, and playgrounds.

After Pearl Harbor he founded Nisei Writers and Artists for Democracy, wrote to the congressional committee hearing the removal case, and got nowhere. Then he went into the camps on purpose. He arrived at Poston, Arizona, in May 1942 as its only voluntary internee, meaning to design parks, ballfields, pools and a cemetery for the people held there. The War Relocation Authority never meant to build it. Administrators treated him as an interloper from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the internees took him for a spy. He applied to leave in June and was classified a suspicious person, for the group he had founded to keep them out of the camps. He took a November furlough, never went back, and drew a deportation order. The FBI opened an espionage case that stopped only when the ACLU stepped in.

In 1974 he bought a photogravure plant across the street from his Long Island City studio and turned it into the first museum in America founded by a living artist, opening it seasonally in 1985. He died of pneumonia at NYU Medical Center on December 30, 1988, at 84. The rejections outlived the men who made them. Bolt of Lightning, his memorial to Benjamin Franklin, was conceived in 1933 and installed in Philadelphia in 1984. Moerenuma Park in Sapporo, the 400-acre landscape he was working on when he died, opened in 2004. The lamps and the table are still manufactured. The museum is still open.

Isamu Noguchi's life against the full span of the corpus.

• News artwork
  A nine-ton stainless steel relief over the Associated Press entrance at Rockefeller Center 1940
• Noguchi table invention
  Made with Herman Miller and in production ever since 1947
• Akari light sculptures invention
  Gifu's paper lanterns rebuilt around the light bulb at the mayor's request 1951
• Sunken Garden for the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library artwork
  Yale University 1964
• Red Cube artwork
  Balanced on a corner outside the old Marine Midland Building in Manhattan 1968
• Moerenuma Park other
  A 400-acre landscape in Sapporo, finished 16 years after his death 2004

• 1907 aged ~3 Arrives at Yokohama and is finally given the name Isamu His father had married someone else by the time the ship docked.
• 1918 aged ~14 Sent alone to school in Indiana at 13 He finished high school in 1922 as Sam Gilmour.
• 1922 aged ~18 Gutzon Borglum tells him he will never be a sculptor He enrolled at Columbia as a premedical student instead.
• 1927 aged ~23 Works seven months in Paris as Constantin Brâncuși's assistant Neither spoke the other's language.
• 1935 aged ~31 Designs Frontier, the first of many sets for Martha Graham
• May 1942 aged 37 Enters the Poston camp in Arizona as a voluntary internee None of the parks he designed there were built.
• 1951 aged ~47 Redesigns Gifu's paper lanterns as the Akari light sculptures He married the singer and actress Yoshiko Yamaguchi around this time — sources give 1951 or 1952. They divorced in 1957.
• 1985 aged ~81 Opens his own museum in Long Island City The first museum in America founded by a living artist.
• December 30, 1988 aged 84 Dies of pneumonia in New York, mid-way through the Sapporo park

• Buckminster Fuller 1895–1983
  Popularized the geodesic dome and promoted resource-efficient structural design. collaborator on the Dymaxion car
• Alexander Calder 1898–1976
  Sculptor who invented the mobile and whose kinetic sculptures changed modern art. met him in Paris
• Robert Moses 1888–1981
  Master builder whose roads, parks, and public works reshaped metropolitan New York while displacing communities and entrenching car dependence. rejected his playground
• Charles Eames 1907–1978
  Designer who with Ray Eames produced molded plywood and fiberglass furniture for American manufacturers. the other modernist who made furniture
• Maya Lin b. 1959
  Designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial whose work transformed American memorial architecture. later sculptor of American public landscape