Akari: Sculpture by Other Means

Akari: Sculpture by Other Means occupies the Museum’s second-floor galleries. It includes several installations that allow visitors to experience ways that Isamu Noguchi’s Akari—a modular ecosystem of lightweight, collapsible paper lanterns—can create and transform space.

The exhibition’s selection of archival material comprises vintage photographs, advertisements, and Akari brochures, all suggesting Noguchi’s thinking about the presentation of Akari as a continually shifting enterprise. Other materials document the numerous exhibitions of Akari between 1952 and 1985, in the home-furnishings marketplace, in galleries, and culminating in his presentation at the 1986 Venice Biennale.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.