explore an unrealized vision of new york through the eyes of isamu noguchi

‘noguchi’s new york’ opens at the artist’s museum

The exhibition, Noguchi’s New York, opens at The Noguchi Museum in Long Island City with a focused look at how one artist spent decades imagining the city as a terrain for sculpture, play, and — most importantly — public life. The show, which exhibits both realized and unrealized projects, is a survey of Isamu Noguchi‘s lifelong relationship with New York, and the experience feels like a tour through an imagined version of what the city might have been.

‘Noguchi celebrated materials as they related to place,’ the curatorial team tells designboom ahead of the show’s opening. ‘Here in New York, he often experimented with metal sculptures because he saw the city as a landscape of metal mountains emerging from the urban environment.’

Noguchi’s New York is on view at the Noguchi Museum from February 4th until July 5th, 2026.

Noguchi’s New York, install view, image © designboom

idealist design for the people of nyc

The exhibition emphasizes the ways in which New York cultivated Isamu Noguchi’s ‘restless sense of idealism.’ He first moved to New York in 1922 at age seventeen, and the city remained his home on-and-off until his death in 1988. The first rooms of the gallery gather works from these early years in the 1930s, when he arrived as a young sculptor searching for a language that could address public life.

Portrait heads of friends and collaborators share space with anti-fascist projects and proposals. A bronze model for Play Mountain (1933), intended either for Central Park or an entire city block, sits low and wide like a piece of topography. Its stepped slopes, sledding run, and bandshell compress the scale of a neighborhood into a single surface.

Seen in person, the scale model feels intimate and tactile. Nearby, newly commissioned animated films project children moving across those contours, translating the bronze maquette into motion. The films answer a practical problem the team mentioned on the tour. It can be hard to picture how a child might occupy a sculpted landscape from a small model. The animations place viewers inside the proposal, climbing and sliding through space that once existed only in the forms of drawings and physical models.

Isamu Noguchi in front of the Plaza Hotel at the debut of his first public sculpture on city land, Unidentified Object (1979) in Doris C. Freedman Plaza, Central Park, NY, 1979. photo: Donna Svennevik, The Noguchi Museum Archives

noguchi celebrates the city’s working class

One realized commission on view at the exhibition may be familiar to New Yorkers: News (Associated Press Building Plaque) (1938–40), Noguchi’s first public work in the United States. It’s is a large-scale stainless steel relief installed at Rockefeller Center. Archival photographs and drawings trace the making of this piece, which renders a group of newspaper men as a celebration of the city’s heroic working class.

The material choice feels deliberate, as stainless steel belongs to the cavernous office towers of midtown Manhattan. Noguchi responded to that context with a relief that reads as both sculpture and architecture.

This relief is among the only realized works which draw heavily from Noguchi’s anti-fascist ideals. A collection of unrealized works are exhibited nearby — these include murals which render cannons shooting moneybags as well as skeletons stabbing a depiction of the financier and investment banker J.P. Morgan.

Isamu Noguchi, News (Associated Press Building Plaque), 1938–40. photo: Miguel de Guzmán and Rocío Romero / ImagenSubliminal. © The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS)

colossal, unrealized playscapes

The heart of the Noguchi’s New York exhibition lies in the artist’s unrealized playgrounds. Five major proposals fill the galleries with bronze studies, drawings, and films. Alongside Play Mountain, there are the 1940 Play Equipment maquettes, including a compact Slide (model) and Jungle Gym (model), each reduced to spare lines and curves. These resemble small modernist sculptures that happen to invite climbing.

Noguchi described these projects as places for open exploration. He wanted children to invent their own routes rather than follow a prescribed path. With Robert Moses as the Parks Commissioner, these proposals were never considered. His first proposal for Play Mountain was rejected outright. He later recalled that the commissioning team ‘turned their thumbs down so forcefully they almost broke their thumbnails.’

The playground which came closest to realization was planned for Manhattan’s Riverside Park in collaboration with the iconic and influential Louis Kahn. Blueprints, plaster models, and studies map out a sculpted terrain along the Hudson, with slide mountains and skating areas flowing into one another. Community opposition stalled the plan, and it slipped away.

Isamu Noguchi, Sunken Garden for Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza, 1960–64. Bronze. photo: © Miguel de Guzmán and Rocío Romero / ImagenSubliminal / The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS)

Downtown Interventions

Among Isamu Noguchi’s most successful realized works in New York, a modernist zen garden, can be found below street level in the financial district. The Sunken Garden for Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza (1961–64) is exhibited through photographs and film. River stones from Kyoto sit in a circular depression at the base of a glass tower. An archival video shows water moving quietly around the stones as office workers eat lunch along the edge.

The garden feels like a pocket of stillness carved into Wall Street. The stones carry geological time into a place governed by minutes. A few blocks away stands Red Cube (1968), tilted and bright against the grid of Lower Manhattan, and many New Yorkers pass it daily without knowing it’s the work of Isamu Noguchi.

Strange Bird (1945) (left), This Tortured Earth, 1942-43 (cast 1977) (center), Chess Table, 1944, fabricated by Herman Miller (right), image © designboom

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Eros, 1966 (left), Fudo, 1966-1967 (center), Night Bird, 1966-1967 (right)

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install view, various portrait heads of friends and collaborators, image © designboom

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Isamu Noguchi, Experiential renderings; Plan of playground components for Riverside Levy Playground, 1961. The Noguchi Museum Archives, CR516.4b. © The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS)

Isamu Noguchi, Swings (model), 1940 (left), Slide (model), 1940 (center), Jungle Gym (model), 1940 (right), The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York; gift of Linda Tatti Beck and Steven Beck from the collection of the Alexander Tatti Family, 2006

Isamu Noguchi and Louis Kahn Site Plan for Riverside Playground, April 20, 1964 Blueprint 39 x 50 1/2 in. (99.1 x 128.3 cm) The Noguchi Museum Archives, CR516.36

Isamu Noguchi, Play Equipment maquettes, 1940. photo: F.S. Lincoln The Noguchi Museum Archives

Isamu Noguchi, Mountains Forming, 1982-1983. fabricated by Peter Carlson Enterprises, collaboration with Gemini G.E.L. hot-dipped galvanized steel. 60 3/4 x 47 x 46 in. (154.3 x 119.4 x 116.8 cm). The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York

Isamu Noguchi, Red Cube, 1968. Photo: Miguel de Guzmán and Rocío Romero / ImagenSubliminal. © The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS)