About the program
Attend a lecture by Marin R. Sullivan, co-curator of the upcoming exhibition Isamu Noguchi: “I am not a designer” at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.
In 1949, Isamu Noguchi firmly assured an interviewer, “I am not a designer.” The statement must have seemed, superficially and in its time and place, reasonable. Popular press of the period tended to name Noguchi a “sculptor”—and often a “celebrated” one. Seventy-five years later, the exhibition Isamu Noguchi: “I am not a designer,” scheduled to open at the High Museum of Art in April 2026, takes the artist’s denial as a provocation, offering both scholarly and general audiences an innovative reconsideration of Noguchi’s full body of work through the lens of design and an expansive reimagination of design’s possibilities.
Although publicly rejecting the label “designer” and its assumed confines, Noguchi regularly engaged with design throughout his career, exploring career-defining concerns of space and form in architecture, industrial design, home furnishings, stage sets, playgrounds, garden landscapes, and other diverse arenas. Such projects, the exhibition argues, were not ancillary to Noguchi’s perhaps better-known sculpture but rather complementary and mutually generative.
Co-curated by the High Museum of Art’s curator of decorative arts and design, Dr. Monica Obniski, and independent curator and sculpture scholar Dr. Marin R. Sullivan, Isamu Noguchi: “I am not a designer” grounds itself in an interdisciplinary approach. For this talk, Sullivan will preview some of the new research that has guided the project.