Mayor Giuliani has invited us all to come to New York City. "Go to a play ... spend some money," he says. The city needs its tourists.
Having monitored the mayor's performance after the Sept. 11 catastrophe, I'm ready to do whatever he suggests. I was in New York City most of August, staying at my son's apartment at Prince and Mott streets in Nolita, Lower Manhattan. It will be more difficult to get there now, but I'm prepared to make the effort. Every day in the city was a great day, as I ate in exceptional restaurants, spent hours in museums, went to the theater and walked through interesting neighborhoods, never dreaming what was ahead.
If I were given the chance to go again, the experience I'd like first to repeat is my visit to the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum in Long Island City, Queens. I went in summer, but the landscaping is designed to reflect the seasons. From pictures I've seen, fall is very beautiful. Open through October, it would be a peaceful place to sit and process how our lives have changed.
The sculptor Noguchi, born in the United States of an American mother, writer Leonie Gilmour, and a Japanese father, poet Yonejiro Noguchi, parents who never married, lived with one foot in each country. And died that way. Half his ashes are buried in his former studio, now a museum, on Shikoku Island, Japan. The other half are in Queens under a modest marker set discreetly in a corner of the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum.
Noguchi, who died at 84 in 1988, could never have known when he chose this industrial site, first for a studio and then for a permanent display of his works, that it would be Queens' destiny to become, at least for a time, the center of the universe for modern art.
On May 21, the Museum of Modern Art will close its doors at 11 W. 53rd St., Manhattan, to begin a period of overhaul and expansion resulting in 50 percent more space. The Japanese architect for the project is Yoshio Taniguchi. For the approximately two years required, MoMA (soon to be known as MoMAQNS) will move to a former Swingline stapler factory in Queens that has been reconfigured by Los Angeles architect Michael Maltzan.
Born in Long Island, Maltzan was formerly associated with Frank Gehry. When the museum reopens in New York, in late 2004 or early 2005, the Swingline building will become an office and study space plus storage facility for MoMA's vast collection. Exhibition space is also being considered.
To fix in everyone's mind the move to a new space, the first not-be-missed show will be an exhibition of the Modern's most famous masterpieces next summer. A major Matisse-Picasso exhibition will follow in 2003.
From its site in Manhattan, MoMA runs a free shuttle bus service to Queens on Saturday and Sunday mornings beginning at 11:30. The bus travels to the Contemporary Art Center, P.S.1, affiliated since 2000 with MoMA, and links up with a bus that then transports visitors to several art-related venues in Queens, including the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum. The trip and transfer take about 40 minutes. The Museum docent who traveled with us said shuttle services from Manhattan to Queens are being considered for next year.
In 1960, Noguchi came to Vernon Boulevard in Queens (across town from the new MoMAQNS site) to be near the stone suppliers clustered in the neighborhood. In 1974, when a photoengraving plant across from his studio went up for sale, he bought it. With his friend and associate, architect Shoji Sadao, he began extensive renovations.
After acquiring a gas station on a triangular piece of property at the adjacent corner, concrete block walls were erected for an area designated as the garden. Carefully chosen grasses and trees were planted, among which Noguchi placed his amazing works, too big and too numerous for museums to store. The works appear as natural additions to the landscape.
He favored boulders of granite and basalt, hard stone that, because of its volcanic properties, took a polish. He recognized the stones that would inspire him and, after purchasing them, waited for their message. About his sculpting, he says, "My every decision came with an inevitability. An overcoming of hesitation."
Believe it. It is apparent that this enormously talented man, by thinking through his materials, has assisted each stone in making a statement.
The museum building adjacent to the small garden shows the artist's range while documenting his history. The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Fridays, and 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekends. Each day at 2 p.m., a tour guide offers insights into the collection.
Our guide, Kathleen Moroney, emphasized the coming together of East and West in Noguchi's work. The artist, whose mother encouraged him in the arts, lived for long periods in both Japan and the United States.
Over the years of his development, he worked in clay, wood, marble, paper, steel and stone. Though his early work shows the influences of the West, his late middle period and final sculptures, recently shipped here from the Noguchi museum in Japan, are rooted in the Orient. One among the many beautiful pieces is an outdoor fountain, both organic and geometric, whose surface and sounds seem to change with the passing day, making it a different sculpture when you leave from when you arrived.
As it happened, a person on our tour had met Noguchi. He shared with us what it was like to visit the garden with the artist, who encouraged friends to run their hands over the stones and enjoy their tactile quality. Visitors ache to do the same but must refrain, as the stone has been found to suffer from hand prints. Winter weather affects them, too, and to minimize the damage, certain pieces are padded and wrapped. What a sight that must be -- the sculptures huddled in their winter coats and covered with snow. Surely it is the time when ghosts walk.
For MoMA information: 212-708-9400. Closed Wednesdays.
For Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum information: 718-204-7088.
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