Choosing to hang a banner outside the Noguchi Museum was a big decision for its director, Jenny Dixon. Since the museum opened in 1985, only a discreet plaque by the entrance to its home — a pair of brick buildings on a quiet street in Long Island City, Queens — has alerted visitors to its presence.
Were it not for the workers' putting finishing touches on the museum and garden last week for the reopening on Saturday, it would have been hard to tell that the institution had undergone a two-and-a-half-year $13.5 million renovation. The floors are distressed concrete; the original wood ceilings are intact; and the tranquil sculpture garden is shaded by a mature Katsura tree.
"We want people to know where we are, but we don't want to change the experience," Ms. Dixon said. "We've tried to keep the intimate feel of the place."
The museum's spirit is a reflection of Isamu Noguchi (1904-88), the Japanese-American sculptor who melded Modernism with Japanese aesthetics. Although he is perhaps best known for what he called his Akari light sculptures (hanging lamps), his work encompassed many disciplines: he designed sets for the choreographers Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham and George Balanchine; he created public sculptures, sculpture parks and sculpture gardens both here and abroad; and he designed furniture for Knoll and the Herman Miller Company.
While Noguchi was one of Long Island City's art pioneers, establishing a studio there in 1961, his museum is now part of what has become a neighborhood of cultural institutions. It includes the Museum for African Art, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, the Sculpture Center and Socrates Sculpture Park. Until late September it also competes for visitors with MoMA QNS, the Museum of Modern Art's temporary space.
Noguchi once wrote that he believed a museum was "a repository against time."
The ravages of time, however, are what necessitated the renovation and the museum's temporary closing on Oct. 31, 2001. Originally a complex of two separate buildings and a sculpture garden, the museum had no heating, no air conditioning and no usable basement. As a result it was open only from April through October. Nor did it have education facilities or space for temporary exhibitions.
The museum's two parts — a former photo-engraving plant built in 1928 and a an adjacent small 1980's building — had been flooded by the East River. The lack of ventilation had turned the rooms musty and damp. Over the years the buildings had settled unevenly, putting stress on the brick walls. The facades also needed repair, as did the steel windows and the leaking roofs. The city gave $3 million toward the project, and the Noguchi Foundation, established in 1971, paid for the rest. (Helen M. Marshall, the Queens borough president, committed another $1.3 million toward a future renovation of the museum's entrance pavilion.)
The two buildings have been joined and will be open year round, thanks to the installation of heating and air conditioning. The 27,000-square-foot museum also has new temporary-exhibition galleries, educational facilities, a new stairway linking the first and second floors, an elevator and wheelchair accessibility. Improved storage makes it possible to preserve the museum's 2,383-piece collection and archives safely.
When visitors enter now, they can choose to go into the galleries, where all of Noguchi's abstract sculptures are where he had originally placed them, or into the sculpture garden. In keeping with Japanese tradition, the museum has no coat room, the signs are discreet, and no guards hover about, a plan that allows viewers to have an intimate relationship with the art. "You can't do that in other places," Ms. Dixon said. "We've kept things very simple. We want people to feel that it is unfinished." The Manhattan architects Sage & Coombe conceived and executed the design.
Born in Los Angeles to an American mother, Leonie Gilmour, a writer, and a Japanese father, the poet Yonejiro Noguchi, Noguchi lived in Japan until he was 13, when he was sent to school in Indiana. He went to New York in 1922 to be a pre-med student at Columbia, taking sculpture classes at night. In 1924 he dropped out of college and became a full-time artist.
In 1927 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to visit the Far East and Paris, where he spent six months working as studio assistant to the Modernist sculptor Brancusi and shortly thereafter produced his first stone carving.
During the 1960's Noguchi lived in a small brick building across the street from what became his museum. Although his former home is currently used for museum offices, the original design is still intact, with movable Soji screens, skylights, a soaking tub, a loftlike sleeping space and Akari lamps hanging from the ceiling.
"It's here, and it exists as his atelier," Ms. Dixon said. "We have lots of ideas for it. We could restore it, make it a visitor's center or restaurant and cafe." But those are dreams for the future.
Another part of the renovation involved relocating and expanding the museum's current design shop and its cafe, whose tin roof has been painstakingly restored. The shop offers a wide range of products, from Noguchi's Akari lamps and furniture designs to other designers' mid-century furniture and design objects like teacups and tools for stone carving. Proceeds from the shop go to the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, as the institution is formally called. Now the museum is showing its first temporary exhibition, "Isamu Noguchi: Sculptural Design," organized by the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, and designed by the American artist Robert Wilson. On view through Oct. 4, it is the first of a continuing program of special shows. The museum also plans to organize traveling exhibitions.
Ms. Dixon said the closing of MoMA QNS would have little impact on the Noguchi Museum. "We were here long before MoMA," she said. "We're different. I don't mean any disrespect, but think of us as a boutique and MoMA as a high-end department store. People come here for a different experience."
Ms. Dixon stressed the museum's need to stay small. It will probably attract only about 500,000 visitors a year (nearly twice its former attendance), she said, but that is more than enough for her.
"We want to refine, deepen and preserve the spirit of Noguchi, to give his work the diligence it deserves," Ms. Dixon said. "And that is not a blockbuster experience."
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