Resumen de Noguchi, Sculptural Abstraction, and the Politics of Japanese American Internment
In 1942 the sculptor Isamu Noguchi was "voluntarily" interned in the Poston (Arizona) Relocation Center for Japanese Americans. Poston represented a significant experience of racialization for this Japanese American sculptor, one that seems to have pushed him to interrogate how race and identity operated within the liberal model of American art during the 1940s. Noguchi’s sculptures of this time approach the relations between race, nation, and identity critically. The particular abstract forms of Noguchi’s work suggest how modern sculpture might evade, resist, or question the racist assumptions that permeated contemporary discourse about the "nature" of American art in the 1940s.
