A largely industrial area of New York’s Long Island City is an unlikely setting for a museum dedicated to the work of world-acclaimed sculptor Isamu Noguchi. But the location is not surprising as Noguchi’s studio has been nearby since 1961. In 1985 he converted a former photo-engraving plant into an intimate space where visitors could experience the totality of his work.

Comprising 10 galleries and a serene outdoor sculpture garden, the museum displays Noguchi’s prodigious achievements in sculpture as well as furniture and lighting designs, ceramics, stage sets, gardens and models for public projects. In 2001 the museum underwent extensive renovations, reopening in 2004 and coinciding with the centennial of Noguchi’s birth.

An internationalist in every sense of the word, Noguchi was born in Los Angeles to a Japanese father and American mother. Raised in Japan, he returned to the United States as a teenager and experienced a life-altering event in 1926 while viewing a New York exhibition of works by Constantin Brancusi. Inspired, Noguchi secured a Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed him to travel to Paris and apprentice in Brancusi’s studio. There he learned to carve stone and wood and developed a deep respect for the intrinsic properties of materials. He was an inveterate traveler. His friend, visionary Buckminster Fuller, once said: “He was always inherently at home—everywhere.” During the 1930s, he studied pottery and gardens in Japan, public works in Mexico and brush drawing in China.

While Noguchi was the master of many disciplines, his greatest achievements came in sculpture, and he was always exploring new forms, techniques and materials. “Sculpture is the depiction of form in space, visible to the mobile spectator as participant,” he said. Noguchi worked mainly in clay, wood and stone, believing the energies of nature were built into them. Not bound to any one style, his sculpture ranged from bronze and terra cotta portrait heads to abstract modernist works.

New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art acquired its first Noguchi work in 1931; it currently owns 13 Noguchi sculptures and four works on paper. The museum held his first major U.S. retrospective in 1968, and over the years it has featured Noguchi in 50 exhibitions and four solo shows. Most recently the museum presented “Isamu Noguchi: Master Sculptor” in 2004–05 in conjunction with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. “Noguchi looked at materials very carefully to make certain they would express specific ideas,” says Dana Miller, associate curator of the Whitney’s permanent collection. A case in point is a 1929 bronze bust of Buckminster Fuller that Noguchi plated with chrome. “He wanted to convey Fuller’s reflective futuristic attitude,” Miller says. (“Best of Friends: Isamu Noguchi and Buckminster Fuller” will be on view at the Noguchi Museum from April to October.)

Manhattan’s PaceWildenstein Gallery has been exhibiting Noguchi sculptures since 1975. At the 2005 Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA) show, a selection of 14 granite sculptures was completely sold with prices ranging up to $350,000. Noguchi’s enormous talents and versatility led him in many directions. During the 1930s, he created stage sets for dancer Martha Graham, a large-scale sculpture symbolizing freedom of the press for the Associated Press building in New York’s Rockefeller Center and the design of the “Radio Nurse,” a Bakelite intercom for a nursery, manufactured by the Zenith Radio Company; it strongly resembled the kendo suit mask Noguchi had worn as a child.