2014 Spring Benefit and Isamu Noguchi Award

May 13, 2014

On May 13, 2014, The Noguchi Museum held its Spring Benefit and presentation of the first annual Isamu Noguchi Award to architect Lord Norman Foster and artist Hiroshi Sugimoto. The evening included a silent auction of Conceptual Forms 0028, a black and white photograph by Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery.

Lord Norman Foster

Recognized as one of the world’s great architects, Lord Norman Foster is known for his complementary yet ultra-modern reinventions of classic buildings and for his simple, streamlined new structures. His architectural signature is a design that opens a building up to the public, is mindful of the environment, and saves money by using modern materials and advanced technology. Born in 1935 in Manchester, England, Foster studied architecture at Manchester University’s School of Architecture and at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. In 1963 he co-founded Team 4 and in 1967 he established Foster Associates, now known as Foster + Partners. Founded in London, it is now a worldwide practice, with project offices in more than twenty countries. Over the past four decades the company has been responsible for a wide range of work, from urban masterplans, public infrastructure, airports, civic and cultural buildings, offices and workplaces to private houses and product design. The practice has received 650 awards and citations for excellence and has won more than 100 international and national competitions. Norman Foster has received numerous awards as well including the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture, the Gold Medal for the French Academy of Architecture, the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal. Foster was granted a Knighthood in the Queen’s Birthday Honors List, 1990, and appointed by the Queen to the Order of Merit in 1997. In 1999 he was honored with a life peerage in the Queen’s Birthday Honors List, taking the title Lord Foster of Thames Bank.

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Born in Japan in 1948, Hiroshi Sugimoto has been a photographer since the 1970s. Sugimoto’s oeuvre deals with history and temporal existence by investigating through a variety of subject matter issues surrounding time, empiricism, and metaphysics. Seascapes, Theaters, Dioramas, Portraits, Architecture, Colors of Shadow, Conceptual Forms, and Lightning Fields are among his many series. Sugimoto has received a number of grants and fellowships, including from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His work is held in the collections of the Tate; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and The Metropolitan Museum, New York, among many others. Portraits, initially created for the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, traveled to the Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York, in March 2001. Sugimoto received the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography in 2001. In 2006, a mid-career retrospective was organized by the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. A monograph entitled Hiroshi Sugimoto was produced in conjunction with the exhibition. He has also had one person exhibitions at the Japan Society, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, among others. He received the Photo España prize in 2006, and in 2009 was the recipient of the Praemium Imperiale, Painting Award from the Japan Arts Association.