Displaying items by tag: brooklyn botanic garden

It’s a great and rare occurrence to see art installed in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Some might argue that this is where you go to look at nature rather than art — although tags and labels on the plants remind you that humans made this garden and bred plenty of the species in it. The Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) is an excellent choice for a show here, since he himself created parks, playgrounds and gardens around the world, drawing heavily from a Japanese art tradition that considered aesthetics in relation to nature.

Is “Isamu Noguchi at Brooklyn Botanic Garden” a great exhibition? No. The Noguchi Museum and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden are to be commended — along with the Noguchi’s senior curator, Dakin Hart, who organized the exhibition — for installing such a show, in which sculpture is exposed to the elements (and the wandering visitors).

Gardens have been formative playgrounds for great artists at least since Michelangelo spent his teenage years poring over antiquities in the Medici gardens in Florence. But few artists have made gardens as central to their work as Isamu Noguchi, whose museum and sculpture garden in Long Island City, Queens, turns 30 this year.

“When the time came for me to work with larger spaces,” Noguchi (1904-88) once said, “I conceived them as gardens, not as sites with objects but as relationships to a whole.”