Nothing is new but everything’s new

Coinciding with its 40th anniversary in 2025, The Noguchi Museum presents Nothing is new but everything’s new, a boxed set of ephemera drawn from photographs and other materials in The Noguchi Museum Archives. The edition’s title is inspired by a quote from a 1986 ARTnews interview with Isamu Noguchi conducted in the months following the opening of the Museum.

The set highlights the unique history of the building and surrounding plot of land in Long Island City, New York, that Isamu Noguchi would eventually purchase and open as the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum in May 1985. It also pays homage to the many people who played formative roles in the Museum’s early years.

The folio includes fifteen distinct elements in the form of postcards, photographic prints, folding spreads, small posters, a letterpress facsimile invitation to the Museum’s opening, a selected timeline of the origin of the Museum, as well as an introductory text by Director of The Noguchi Museum, Amy Hau, whose work with Noguchi began as his assistant in 1986.

Handmade enclosure and letterpress printing by Jon Beacham of the Holyoke, Massachusetts-based studio The Brother In Elysium. Offset printing by GHP Media in New Haven, Connecticut.

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A lot of what we see today in art is fragments of what has already been done long ago—people were interested in these same problems, these same significances, shapes, situations. Nothing is new, but everything’s new. That’s what keeps us living and pulls us along. I think in a way it’s the artist’s duty to pull people along with him. That’s why we do art, thinking that we might enrapture people somehow. Art is a continuous search. There’s no end to it, and that is what makes it so marvelous.

– Isamu Noguchi, ARTnews, March 1986