2024 Benefit and Isamu Noguchi Award

October 29, 2024

On Tuesday, October 29, 2024, The Noguchi Museum will host its fall benefit gala and presentation of the Isamu Noguchi Award. The 2024 Isamu Noguchi Award will recognize Pulitzer Prize-winning short story writer, novelist, and translator Jhumpa Lahiri and 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.

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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.

Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri, British-American, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Interpreter of Maladies, is renowned for her exploration of immigrant experiences and identity struggles. Her acclaimed works, including The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, The Lowland, In Other Words, and Whereabouts showcase her storytelling in both English and Italian. In addition to numerous literary awards, Lahiri has translated notable Italian works and currently serves as the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College. 

In 2014, Lahiri was awarded the prestigious National Humanities Medal. As well as the Pulitzer Prize, Lahiri has been awarded the PEN/Hemingway Award, an O. Henry Prize (for the short story “Interpreter of Maladies”), the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Vallombrosa Von Rezzori Prize, the Asian American Literary Award, and the 2017 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. Lahiri was also granted a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2006. She was also named Commander of the Italian Republic in 2019 by President Sergio Mattarella. Lahiri divides her time between New York City and Rome. 

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.