No Ordinary Light: Akari at 75

A monumental paper lantern measuring roughly two meters across takes its place at the Noguchi Museum in New York for No Ordinary Light: Akari at 75. The exhibition traces the development of Isamu Noguchi‘s Akari light sculptures, first conceived in Gifu, Japan, in 1951. Over the following decades, Noguchi developed more than 200 variations of the familiar illuminated forms.

Among the works identified for the presentation is the large-scale 200D, created around 1985, alongside archival sketchbooks and examples of Noguchi’s sculpture in other materials. The exhibition revisits Akari’s appearance at the home of Charles and Ray Eames in 1951 and its later presentation at the 1986 Venice Biennale, following the movement of these paper forms between sculpture and the domestic interior.