Noguchi continued to create and exhibit Akari all the way through his contributions to the 1986 Venice Biennale, but the Noguchi Museum Shop’s offering hones in on the sculptor and designer’s work during a particularly fruitful period of initial inspiration. Already fascinated by what he referred to as “self-illuminated sculptures” like the Lunars series, a summer trip in 1951 to Gifu sparked an interest in the more traditional form of lantern-making exemplified by the Japanese city’s eponymous style of paper lantern. By September 1952, a small subset of the many Akari prototypes Noguchi completed during the intervening period (including some featured in the Early Patterns collection) went on display at the Museum of Modern Art in Kamakura, representing the first proper Akari exhibition of its kind.
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Noguchi teamed with Ozeki & Co to make a small subset of these Akari prototypes available to the American public by the mid-’50s, but it took years for the designs found in Early Patterns to arrive stateside—only to eventually fall out of circulation. Why exactly that happened remains uncertain, though Scott suggests “a combination of Noguchi’s and various retailers’—including Bloomingdale’s in the late ’60s—ideas of what the market wanted” may be to blame.
Much like that original run, this presentation only lasts a short while. Each Akari will be available for purchase exclusively in the Noguchi Museum Shop in Long Island City, Queens, from May 17–28. For those unable to attend NYCxDesign in person, the museum’s webstore will make the remaining supply available for purchase thereafter.
Given that even experts like Scott admit there’s still more to the mystery of Noguchi’s Akari work to uncover, the public stands to benefit greatly from the reemergence of these designs. And though what one can see and buy at Early Patterns is already promising enough, Scott hints that this might not be the end of Akari discovery and distribution for the museum.
“As the popularity of Akari has grown again in recent years, capturing the attention of new generations with its blend of traditional craft and forward-thinking, it’s important for us to keep diving into its history specifically and share the fruits of that labor with the public,” he says. “Just like Noguchi aimed to challenge our ideas of what sculpture could be, we strive to keep pushing the understanding of Akari forward.”