Organized as a personal travelogue, this exhibition provided insight into world-renowned Japanese American artist Isamu Noguchi’s (1904–1988) sustained artistic and personal engagement with Asia. The Bollingen Foundation, with the support of Paul and Mary Conover Mellon, funded many projects, including the dissemination of Carl Jung’s essays and translations of early Asian texts. The foundation awarded Noguchi several fellowships to travel to India, Indonesia, Japan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere. A selection of his travel photographs captured civic and archaeological sites as well as daily rites and performance rituals. The exhibition included a limited-edition Ivory Press book with original artwork and a text by Pico Iyer.

Co-organized by the Noguchi Museum and the Sackler Center for Arts Education.

Related Program

Coomaraswamy Films
Fridays, January 30–April 19, 2009, 11 am–5 pm
New Media Theater

The Ceylonese-born art historian, collector, and curator, Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy (1877–1947) expanded American aesthetics from object-based connoisseurship toward an understanding of the symbolic value of art. Traveling to Asia in the 1920s with his wife and American modern dancer, Stella Bloch, Coomaraswamy used the latest image technology to document ritual dance, performance festivals, and religious sites, highlighting the relationships between art, life, and nature. Stripped of sound, these black-and-white films allowed viewers to fully experience the formal expressiveness of rhythmic movement, facial inflections, and gestural phrasing.