2024 Benefit and Isamu Noguchi Award
October 29, 2024
The Isamu Noguchi Award. Photo: Don Stahl. ©INFGM / ARS
On Tuesday, October 29, 2024, The Noguchi Museum hosted its fall benefit gala and presentation of the Isamu Noguchi Award. The 2024 Isamu Noguchi Award recognizes artist, philosopher, writer, and poet Lee Ufan.
The Noguchi Museum’s annual benefit raises essential funds to support its exhibitions, research, and programming, and the care of its renowned collection. For more information, contact Melissa Gatz at benefit@noguchi.org or 718.204.7088 ext 229.
The Isamu Noguchi Award
Established in 2014 and presented annually, the Isamu Noguchi Award acknowledges highly accomplished individuals who share Noguchi’s spirit of innovation, unbounded imagination, and uncompromising commitment to creativity. The Award celebrates individuals from around the world, across various disciplines, whose works demonstrate the highest level of artistic integrity marked by fearless experimentation and a preoccupation with cross-cultural dialogue and exchange. Honoring creatives whose work exhibits qualities of artistic excellence that are shared with Noguchi, the Award also recognizes work that carries significant social consciousness and function.
2024 Honorees
Photo: Claire Dorn
Lee Ufan
Lee Ufan, currently based in Japan and France, was born in Korea. He graduated from Nihon University, Department of Philosophy, Tokyo in 1961 and served as Professor Emeritus at Tama Art University. He is one of the leading figures of Mono-ha (School of Things), a contemporary art movement emerging in the late 1960s.
Major exhibitions include Lee Ufan (2001, Kunstmuseum Bonn), Lee Ufan: The Art of Margins (2005, Yokohama Museum of Art), Resonance (2007, Venice Biennale), Lee Ufan (2008, Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium), Marking Infinity (2011, Guggenheim Museum NYC), Lee Ufan Versailles (2014, Château de Versailles), Lee Ufan. Inhabiting Time (2019, Centre Pompidou-Metz), Lee Ufan: Open Dimension (2019, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden), and Lee Ufan (2023, Hamburger Bahnhof).
Lee Ufan Arles opened in 2022 following the Lee Ufan Museum in Naoshima, Japan, in 2010 and Space Lee Ufan in Busan, Korea, in 2015.