#NewsFlash | Free admission, tours, performance, crafts and gallery show at Noguchi on Feb. 19
BY QEDC It's In Queens
It’s going to be a fantastic event — even if it derives from a horrible milestone.
Noguchi Museum hosts Community Day on Sunday, Feb. 19. With free admission, the program begins at 10:30 am with two hours of family-friendly art, story-telling, and sand-drawing. At 2 pm, public tours of the gallery begin. Then at 3 pm, Kimi Maeda presents Bend.
Maeda’s solo act tells the story of her father, who was forcibly taken to the Poston War Relocation Center in Arizona at age nine. (It’s the 75th anniversary of Executive Order 9066, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s directive that authorized the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.)
Maeda uses live-feed projections of sand drawings with video footage from the 1940s to portray the friendship that her father developed with Isamu Noguchi, who was in the same internment camp at the same time. President Roosevelt’s mandate only applied to residents of Western states, and since Noguchi lived in New York City at the time, he was exempt. Nevertheless, he voluntarily lived in Poston for seven months.
Maeda’s performance accompanies Self-Interned, 1942: Noguchi in Poston War Relocation Center, a roughly-24-piece exhibition that’s on display in the gallery until Jan. 7, 2018. The show demonstrates Poston’s influence on Noguchi. For example, one item is a bust of actress Lily Zietz from 1941, when Noguchi was making a living by doing portraits just before going to Poston. Pieces such as Yellow Landscape (1943, below) lash out at anti-Asian stereotyping. At the end are sculptures created after his return to NYC in 1944.
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Top photo: Kirk Murphy; bottom image: Kevin Noble