A Reading List from the Director of the Noguchi Museum

In 1986, Amy Hau started moving with the Japanese American artist, designer, and designer Isamu Noguchi arsenic an adjunct astatine his workplace complex, successful Long Island City. In 2024, she returned to the space, which present houses the Noguchi Museum—what the creator had called his “gift to the city”—as its director. Lately, Hau spends astir of her speechmaking clip connected archival worldly related to the artist, but she sat down with america to sermon a fewer books that person influenced her enactment and the mode she thinks astir Noguchi and his themes—among them displacement, community, inheritance, and cross-cultural exchange. Her remarks person been edited and condensed.

Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa

by Marilyn Chase

I’m ever fascinated by artists’ biographies—reading astir wherever they came from, however they were capable to bash the enactment that they did, their obsessions and their points of view. Asawa was calved successful California successful 1926, and was 1 of implicit a 100 1000 Japanese Americans who were interned during the Second World War.

I deliberation it’s casual to pigeonhole radical into categories—Asian, for one—or to specify them by their achy experiences. But Asawa, similar Noguchi, showed existent resilience. In 1942, Noguchi chose to participate an internment campy successful Arizona due to the fact that helium hoped to assistance find a mode to marque the conditions livable for the radical who had nary choice. Both of them came retired of these hard experiences saying I’m not going to beryllium defined by this.

Another happening that’s astonishing to maine astir Asawa, and that Chase’s publication reveals, is her narration to her household and her community. She had six children. There are photographs of her kids successful here, sitting astir with her arsenic she’s making her work. She besides devoted a batch of clip to teaching and moving with schoolkids connected public-art projects successful San Francisco, which is singular to me.

Hidden successful Plain Sight

by Karin Higa

Higa was a pioneering creation historiographer and curator who died successful 2013, erstwhile she was lone successful her precocious forties. It’s truthful bittersweet that we mislaid her voice. In this book, which is simply a postulation of immoderate of her writing, she covers celebrated artists, similar Asawa, but besides artists who were small known. And these artists—she makes it wide that they’re Asian, yes, but they’re besides American. Her reasoning was precise multicultural. I ever thought, How wonderful, to beryllium celebrating the confluence of antithetic cultures successful these artists’ lives and works. That’s a taxable I deliberation astir with respect to Noguchi’s work, too. Because, successful immoderate ways, helium did person a small spot of an individuality crisis. When helium was successful the U.S., helium was benignant of seen arsenic Japanese, but successful Japan, helium was seen arsenic an American. When helium went backmost to Japan aft the war, helium projected a memorial for Hiroshima, but it was rejected due to the fact that helium was an American, and it was thought that his information would person been excessively achy for people, astatine that time. So Noguchi struggled each his beingness to find a balance, asking questions like, Where bash I belong? Am I much Asian, oregon americium I much Western? He utilized that hostility erstwhile helium needed to. And, I besides deliberation that, toward the extremity of his life, erstwhile I got to cognize him, helium had a existent consciousness of arriving, successful a way. He received a National Medal of Arts, and helium besides got peculiar designation from the Japanese government. To spot that acknowledgment precocious successful his life, to beryllium embraced by both, truly meant a lot, I think.