The Adjacent Guide
PlaceA museum an artist designed for his own work, in a former factory.
The Noguchi Museum · Long Island City, Queens, New York
The first museum in the United States established, designed and installed by a living artist to show their own work.
Isamu Noguchi set up his studio in Long Island City in 1961. By 1974 he had also bought an abandoned factory building and a vacant lot across the street, and over the next decade he turned them into a museum and garden for his own work.
It opened in 1985, the first museum in the United States established, designed and installed by a living artist to show their own work. Sculpture fills open-air and indoor galleries in the repurposed 1920s building, often without barriers or interpretation, so the work does most of the talking.
“This is called a garden museum as a metaphor for the world.”
Give it an unhurried afternoon. It is one of the rare museums where the building, the garden and the collection were all shaped by the same hand.
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