Isamu Noguchi

Olmec and Muse (1985), basalt; by Isamu Noguchi, sold at auction in 2017 for $4.98 million. A title, a year, a material, an artist, the passage of time, a price. A legacy of cultures, a legacy of earth, a legacy of an artist, and “legacy” as a facetious pun—money or property left to the living by the dead.

What does it mean to continue a legacy?

Even a simple understanding of Isamu Noguchi’s work will illuminate some meaning from a piece like Olmec and Muse. It looks to ancient cultures and forms, it is crafted from the same material as the Mesoamerican Olmec heads, and it is codified by pointing back to the relationship humans have with the universe—the Muses. In 1985, the same year Olmec and Muse was made, Noguchi became the first living artist to establish a museum solely for his own work—a space intended to let the art exist for its own sake, free from the noise of the art world. Noguchi was born in 1904 before the invention of the airplane and died in 1988, just a few months prior to the invention of the World Wide Web. His life spanned the touchstones of the 20th century as ease of communication and travel grew on a global scale. Yet, despite these new horizons, the core personal, spiritual questions born into each individual remained present within the artist’s work. “Where was home? Why are we here? What will I leave behind?”

Noguchi ran to the past and pushed toward the future to define the present. He learned from and worked with the peoples of the world—the laborers, the artists, the gardeners, the craftspeople, the activists, and the survivors. It was through global communities that he found himself as an individual.

On one hand, Noguchi is most known for volunteering to be incarcerated in a Japanese-American concentration camp during WWII as an act of solidarity with west coast Japanese-Americans (Noguchi was living on the east coast at the time), while on the other hand, Noguchi is most famous for his Akari light sculptures—a staple in mid-century modern furniture. What many people may not know, however, is that these two hands hold one another. Having witnessed what it meant for people to recreate a home in a desert barracks with only the things they were able to carry, Noguchi designed all his paper lanterns to be flat packed and transported easily. The lamps are a modern continuation of tradition, handmade in Gifu by skilled craftspeople, they are affordable sculpture and a portal to transform any room into “home.”

In 2017, the same year that Olmec and Muse set the record for the most expensive Noguchi piece sold at auction, The Noguchi Museum’s exhibition, Self-Interned, 1942, focused on the artist’s time, experience and the aftermath of being “interned.” Opening on January 18th, the exhibition was born into the first inauguration of Donald Trump. In February, 2017, The Day of Remembrance was the most highly attended day in the Museum’s history up until that point. Humanity and politics intersected at the museum, allowing people to join in community and to consider the most basic existential human questions, “Where was home? Why are we here? What will I leave behind?”

This year, the New York City chapter of The Day of Remembrance Committee was completely absent from The Noguchi Museum. As an organization that highlights not just Japanese-American civil rights issues, but has also deeply considered the plight of the Palestinian people in the struggle against oppression, DOR NYC, along with other community organization, programmatic partners and artists cut their ties entirely with The Noguchi Museum after Director Amy Hau in collaboration with Deputy Director Jennifer Lorch and board Co-Chairs Susan Kessler and Spencer Bailey banned staff from wearing keffiyehs. The artist’s legacy had completely inverted on itself.

So what happened in eight years? The truth is, behind closed doors, The Noguchi Museum was always rife with labor issues and in some ways, the keffiyeh ban can be seen as the straw that broke the camel’s back. (The longer history of racism, power imbalances, and a hostile work environment was exposed in a 70,000-word document we released last month.) The staff lived in dual realities—what the artist’s legacy was in principle versus how the museum’s board and top two leaders ran the institution in practice.

Noguchi’s cultural prominence continued to rise. In 2023, his sculpture The Family (1956) set a new auction record, selling for $12.28 million. That same year, internal turmoil shook the museum: the CFO resigned in protest, citing unworkable and racist conditions, and several staff members were hospitalized. A recurring pattern of demand letters, racist firings, retaliation, and protest resignations have been disturbingly commonplace.

The sanitization, depoliticization, and whitewashing of an artist is hardly a new story. In fact, it’s the norm. But what was surprising was the lengths to which fear could drive leadership to maintain “comfort.”

Leadership clings to absolute power not for peace of mind, but because their sense of self depends on control. When collaboration itself is seen as a threat, power can only feel secure through the destruction of community. When the institution’s original purpose was to continue the legacy of the artist, we wonder whose legacy it is meant to protect now.

The staff voted unanimously to unionize in January 2025, something that is not just rare, but telling. The community, now also acutely aware, has stood up for the staff, the artist and the future of the institution.

The art world has always reduced historical activism to background decoration, and it has done so in the name of “legacy.” But as people of conscience, we know the other meaning of the word—we know what can’t be bought or sold.

Our community demands letter, first delivered to the board on May 23rd, is still available to read and sign at bit.ly/NoguchiDemands

We are continuing a legacy—a sculpture is more than a stone.