Noguchi's Imaginary Landscapes is an exhibition of 80 sculptures, 119 photo panels, and 33 charts installed in the Special Exhibitions Gallery.

The ancient environments of leisure and ritual and the ceremonial spaces of past cultures--the Samrat Yantra Observatory in India, the Great Serpent Mound in Ohio, Egyptian pyramids, Zen mediation gardens--served as important and enduring sources of inspiration. Noguchi's Japanese-American heritage--and his ongoing exploration of this dual identity--also infused his designs with a unique understanding of both Eastern and Western traditions. More than seventy-five projects are presented in archival photographs--many showing Noguchi's beautiful bronze and plaster models--as well as plans and other drawings created especially for this book.

A witty and thought-provoking collection of visual poems constructed from stacks of books. Delighting in the look and feel of books, conceptual artist Nina Katchadourian’s playful photographic series proves that books’ covers—or more specifically, their spines—can speak volumes. Over the past two decades, Katchadourian has perused libraries across the globe, selecting, stacking, and photographing groupings of two, three, four, or five books so that their titles can be read as sentences, creating whimsical narratives from the text found there. Thought-provoking, clever, and at times laugh-out-loud funny (one cluster of titles from the Akron Museum of Art’s research library consists of: Primitive Art /Just Imagine/Picasso/Raised by Wolves), Sorted Books is an enthralling collection of visual poems full of wry wit and bookish smarts. Praise for Sorted Books “Katchadourian’s project . . . takes on a weight beyond its initial novelty. It’s a love letter to books, book collecting and the act of reading.” —San Francisco Chronicle “As a longtime fan of [Katchadourian’s] long-running Sorted Books project I’m thrilled for the release of Sorted Books—a collection spanning nearly two decades of her witty and wise minimalist mediations on life by way of ingeniously arranged book spines. . . . In an era drowned in periodic death tolls for the future of the physical book, her project stands as a celebration of the spirit embedded in the magnificent materiality of the printed page.” —Brain Pickings “Katchadourian’s stacks possess an understated sophistication; they are true to the intimate nature of books and yet reveal their dramatic features and unexpected potential.” —Publishers Weekly

"From the author of Arshile Gorky, a major biography of the great American sculptor that redefines his legacy"--

An art history professor and author or editor of 30 books on art and culture maps the life of Japanese-American sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) and his spiritual journey, both in the events of his life and in the milestones of his art--the sculptures, gardens, public spaces, and stage decors that gained force and significance from Noguchi's double heritage. Photographs.

Art in the Encounter of Nations is the first book-length study of interactions between the Japanese and American art worlds in the early postwar years. It brings to light a rich exchange of opinions and debates regarding the relationship between the art of the two nations. The author begins with an examination of the Japanese margins of American Abstract Expressionism. Taking a contrapuntal approach, he investigates four abstract painters: two Japanese artists who moved to the United States (Okada Kenzo and Hasegawa Saburo) and two European Americans whose work is often associated with Japanese calligraphy (Mark Tobey and Franz Kline). He then looks at the work of two young scions of the calligraphy and pottery worlds of Japan -- Morita Shiryo and Yagi Kazuo -- and argues that their radical innovations in these ancient arts were, in part, provoked by their sense of a threat posed by Euro-American modernity. The final chapter is devoted to the career of Japanese American sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi, whose feeling of affiliation was directed to both the U.S. and Japan in shifting ratios through a series of public and private places, each posing unique opportunities for exploring national distinctions.