Museum of Stones: Ancient and Contemporary Art at The Noguchi Museum

Museum of Stones: Ancient and Contemporary Art at The Noguchi Museum (October 7, 2015 to January 10, 2016) was the first exhibition in the Museum's history to insert the work of contemporary artists into the original Noguchi installation. The show looked at the ways artists from different times, civilizations, and cultures have used rock and stone. This publication, featuring three essays and dozens of installation photographs, accompanied the exhibition.

Noguchi believed that rock and stone have a lifecycle that they should experience in full, but he also recognized that they are the raw materials of technology, to be used for that purpose, an ambivalence that shaped his life’s work. As well as sculptures by Noguchi, the show included fifty works by thirty international artists, stones from the ancient forts of Jerusalem, rocks used by mathematicians, and Chinese rock-related objects loaned from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.