The Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, Queens, is celebrating its 40th anniversary the best way it knows how: by looking at itself anew. Against Time: The Noguchi Museum 40th Anniversary Reinstallation opened on October 21, 2026, and runs through April 11, 2027, filling the museum and its beloved sculpture garden with a fresh reading of Isamu Noguchi’s life’s work.
Staged in dialogue with Noguchi’s own final installation of the museum in 1988 — the last arrangement he personally oversaw before his death — the reinstallation draws on the museum’s holdings of roughly 375 sculptures, models, and designs. Familiar masterworks return to view alongside pieces rarely shown in New York, while recently conserved highlights include the artist’s first mature stone sculpture, Tsukubai (1961), and the enigmatic The Mountain (1964), a work Noguchi kept in his Long Island City studio for decades.
The arc of the show travels from Noguchi’s 1920s and 1930s portrait busts — of Martha Graham, Buckminster Fuller, and his uncle Takagi, among others — through his interlocking slab sculptures, his celebrated Akari light sculptures, and the monumental late stones. The open-air garden, planted with birch, hornbeam, and katsura trees around basalt and granite works, remains the calm heart of the visit.
Founded in 1985 in a converted photo-engraving plant across from Noguchi’s studio, the museum was the first in the United States created by a living artist for his own work. Forty years on, Against Time is both a birthday party and a quiet revelation. The museum is open Wednesday through Sunday, 11 am to 6 pm, with pay-what-you-wish admission on the first Friday of each month.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
