Recently, I spent a day visiting two hugely different museums in Queens, New York, each devoted to one singular defining artist of the 20th century, the sculptor Isamu Noguchi and the musician, singer, bandleader, and performer Louis Armstrong.
Isamu Noguchi Museum
Sculpture by Isamu Noguchi, Garden of Noguchi Museum
Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) was an American sculptor and landscape architect whose career included public artworks, set design, landscape design, and commercially produced furniture and lamps. In 1985, the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, now just known as the Noguchi Museum opened in Long Island City, Queens, in what was once a photogravure plant and gas station. At the time, it was the first such museum to be established by a living artist in America.
Over the years, the museum has undergone several renovations and expansions and there are now plans to renovate the artist's original living and studio space across the street as well as for a new two-story, 6,000-square-foot building adjacent to the studio to house the museum's collection and archival material.
Noguchi's life and work took him all over the world. Born in Los Angeles in 1904, he spent part of his childhood living in several locations in Japan. Returning to the US to complete high school, upon graduation in 1922, he was apprenticed to sculptor Gutzon Borglum who is best known for the sculptures on Mount Rushmore. Over the next several decades, Noguchi supported himself by making commissioned portrait busts including Martha Graham and Buckminster Fuller. In Paris, Noguchi apprenticed to Constantin Brancusi. In Mexico he completed a mural for the Abelardo Rodriguez market in Mexico City. He traveled to China to study brush painting with Qi Bashi and to Japan to learn about Zen gardens and clay funerary figures from potter Uno Jinmatsu, he studied the purity of marble in Italy.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Noguchi protested the internment of Japanese citizens by voluntarily reporting to an internment camp out of solidarity with Japanese Americans, for which he was later investigated by the FBI and ordered deported, only to have the order rescinded due to the intervention of the ACLU.
In 1947 he became one of several artists to collaborate with the Herman Miller furniture company, designing the iconic Noguchi table, still in production to this day.
For the next four decades, Noguchi made sculptures that expressed his investigations of materials, moods and nature. The museum holds the world's largest collection of Noguchi's sculptures, drawings, models and designs.
A visit to the Noguchi museum is to be struck by the simplicity and the complexity of what Noguchi achieved in so wide a variety of materials and styles: Vertical, horizontal, figurative, abstract, metal, wood, iron, stone, marble, clay, solid or a play of negative and positive space – the range of Noguchi's creations is mindboggling – and truly it takes a whole museum to appreciate it all.
The garden which Noguchi himself planned, is meant as a meditative oasis of his works to trigger the contemplation of other ways to be in the world.
There is a saying that there are only two kinds of sculptors: Those who pare away to arrive at their creation, and those who add and build up their creation. Noguchi was both.
For more information: The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, 9-01 33rd Road (at Vernon Boulevard) Long Island City, New York 11106. Tel: 718.204.7088, Email info@noguchi.org
Louis Armstrong House Museum, Corona Queens
Louis Armstrong
The home Louis Armstrong lived in for the last decades of his life; the home where he died, is a museum, preserved very much as it was in his day.
Frankly, it's a bit strange to visit the home and to see his bathroom or bedroom, or to hear about the wallpaper his wife chose. If you are not a diehard Satchmo fan, looking to commune with the site of one of your heroes, this is not a must-see.
On the other hand, if each moment you get of Pops' presence is meaningful to you, and it is to me, it was worth being there, just to stand in the rooms where…
As you may know, Louis Armstrong fell in love with reel-to-reel recording, and in his home, he recorded everything: Conversations when friends were over, how own appearances on TV; at times he recorded himself playing to a recording of his own work or to another's recording; or when he wanted to revisit his own recordings and talk about them. Hundreds and Hundreds of hours of tape exist.
At the Louis Armstrong home tour, they have managed to cue up a few of those recordings to play when you are in specific rooms. To hear Armstrong speaking, to hear his familiar rasp, to be lifted by the joy in his voice, is priceless. And to do so standing in the room where he made and kept his recordings is even more special.
I will add that there is a very nice garden beside Armstrong's house to sit in. Directly across the street they are building a new visitor's center and theater where visitors will see a short film about Armstrong's life – and perhaps there may be occasional performances there.
It's a cliché of tourist shops to sell a T-shirt that says: My parents went on vacation and all I got was this lousy T-shirt. But I am happy to say that I went to the Louis Armstrong House and bought a T-shirt there of Armstrong playing which I will proudly wear for as long as the shirt lasts.
For more information: LOUIS ARMSTRONG HOUSE MUSEUM 34-56 107th Street Corona, NY 11368 718-478-8274
