Playscapes, Piedmont Park, Atlanta, Georgia, 1975–1976. Image courtesy The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum.
In 1949, Isamu Noguchi firmly assured an interviewer, “I am not a designer.” The statement must have seemed, superficially and in its time and place, reasonable. Popular press of the period tended to name Noguchi as a “sculptor”—and often a “celebrated” one. Seventy-five years later, the exhibition Isamu Noguchi: “I am not a designer,” scheduled to open at the High Museum of Art in April 2026, takes the artist’s denial as a provocation, offering both scholarly and general audiences an innovative reconsideration of Noguchi’s full body of work through the lens of design and an expansive reimagination of design’s possibilities.
Although publicly rejecting the label “designer” and its assumed confines, Noguchi regularly engaged with design throughout his career, exploring career-defining concerns of space and form in architecture, industrial design, home furnishings, stage sets, playgrounds, garden landscapes, and other diverse arenas. Such projects, the exhibition argues, were not ancillary to Noguchi’s perhaps better-known sculpture but rather complementary and mutually generative.
Co-curated by the High Museum of Art’s curator of decorative arts and design Dr. Monica Obniski and independent curator and sculpture scholar Dr. Marin R. Sullivan, Isamu Noguchi: “I am not a designer” grounds itself in an interdisciplinary approach. For this talk, Sullivan will preview some of the new research that has guided the project.
Gardens for UNESCO, Paris, 1956–1958. Image courtesy The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum.
Lobby Ceiling, American Stove Company Building, 1946–1947. Photo by Hedrich-Blessing, 1948.
Isamu Noguchi with Lever Brothers Building Courtyard Model, 1952. Image courtesy The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum. Photo by Charles Uht.
Isamu Noguchi with a Chess Table (model IN-61, designed 1944; manufactured by Herman Miller 1947–1949), Coffee Table (IN-50, 1946; manufactured ca. 1948–1953 by Herman Miller), Statue (1946), and The Queen (1931) in his MacDougal Alley studio, New York, ca. 1947. Image courtesy The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum. Photo by Geoffrey Baker.
