Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within (The First Nationally Touring Retrospective of Takaezu’s Work in Twenty Years) Mar 20 - Jul 28,'24 -Noguchi MuseumNEW

On the centennial anniversary of the birth of artist Toshiko Takaezu (1922-2011), The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum announced its forthcoming major touring retrospective and monograph centered on her work and life. This will be the first nationally touring retrospective of Takaezu’s work in twenty years. To coincide with the exhibition, the Museum will publish a new monograph in association with Yale University Press.

The retrospective is organized by The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, with assistance from the Toshiko Takaezu Foundation and the Takaezu family. It is co-curated by art historian Glenn Adamson, Noguchi Museum Curator Kate Wiener, and composer and sound artist Leilehua Lanzilotti. The exhibition was conceived and developed with former Noguchi Museum Senior Curator Dakin Hart. The show at The Noguchi Museum will feature more than 200 works from private and public collections around the country. Following its presentation at The Noguchi Museum, the exhibition will travel to several additional venues across the United States.

Dates
March 20, 2024 - July 28, 2024

Exhibition
The exhibition consists of a chronological retrospective that charts the development of her empirical-conceptual practice as well as several large-scale installations based on ones she made in her lifetime.

Included works span her seven-decade career, beginning in the late 1940s. Installations will focus on Takaezu’s systematic experimentation with ceramics as an art form combining sculpture and painting-at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, in her teaching years at the Cleveland Institute of Art, and in her increasingly environmental approach to ceramics and installations of her work after her move to a large studio in New Jersey (where she also taught at Princeton University). From the late 1960s on, she had unified her approach to ceramics, sculpture, and painting to consistently convey the sublimity of nature in individual pots. In addition to the ceramic works for which she is best known, the exhibition will also include rarely-seen paintings and weavings in which she explored and perfected her ideas about abstract painting.

Thematic installations based on exhibitions she presented during her lifetime will include displays inspired by her Star Series, moons, Gaea and Devastation Forest installations, and garden seats. Also included will be an interactive installation and concert program of new works by composer Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti (finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in music) centered on the hidden element of sound in Takaezu’s works. Takaezu filled many of her closed forms with “rattles,” encouraging viewers to navigate their unseen interior volumes through sound.