“People were not ready for Noguchi’s galvanized steel sculptures in the early 1980s when he made them,” Dakin Hart, senior curator at the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, told the website Dezeen in 2022. “Or for the idea of Noguchi as someone as interested in naturalizing industry as he was in direct carving.”
The potential for surprise holds true four years later, when a traveling exhibition of Noguchi’s steel works comes to Orlando for an extended stay. With a title straight out of a Wire or Public Image Ltd. album, Metal the Mirror will be the first time that Noguchi’s work has been exhibited in Central Florida for nearly two decades. It’s here courtesy of the Mennello Museum and the foundation Art Bridges, and the wait will have been well worth it.
Though best known for his sleek and artful furniture designs that helped shape the midcentury modern aesthetic (particularly a glass-topped coffee table designed for Herman Miller and the delicate paper Akari lights), he also designed public parks and built sets and props for Martha Graham’s ballets.
But these 26 metal sculptures — of which the Orlando show collects nine — are a very different and very personal proposition. Created between 1982 and 1983, in the final years of Noguchi’s life, these works were an attempt to express and unite dualities and seeming oppositions: industry and nature, and Noguchi’s own lifelong feelings of “in-betweenness” as a Japanese-American.
The harmonizing of opposites is artfully evident. These galvanized steel structures are poetic and almost delicate. The steel is the opposite of imposing and powerful; it is in turns organic and evocative of the same nature it is usually employed to devour and conquer.
“There’s three themes in this show — nature and forms in nature; then it’s rooted in the human figure, and that goes to some Zen aspects of the human figure as found in nature; and the last one is abstraction, also found in nature. So that’s our mountains. It’s our fruit, it’s Zen meditation. And his conversation about the mirror is really the material and the reflective quality,” explains Mennello executive director Shannon Fitzgerald to Orlando Weekly.
The seemingly industrial becoming organic and vulnerable is the immediate reaction when viewing pieces like the elegant obelisk that is “Lady Mirror” and the gentle shapes and curves that interlock to make up “Cloud Mountain.”
“He treated the steel [by hot-dip galvanizing] to really get to its surface. That is where the reflective quality comes in. This heavy steel, that he thought was associated with industrialism and American strength, he makes it actually more vulnerable in its surface, but also what it’s addressing in nature,” says Fitzgerald. “It goes full circle.”
The arrangement of the sculptures is just as intentional, broken up by the three themes into three different rooms of the intimate Mennello space. Fitzgerald posits that the arrangements and inherent nature of the art make for a quiet and contemplative experience.
“I think one of the things Noguchi was always concerned about is the movement of visitors. So there’s this human experience by the viewer to circulate among these sculptures and walk around them. Why is this called ‘Mountain’? Why is this ‘Persimmon’? They’re very beautiful, but rooted in organic harmony.”
To provide context to these more abstract works, there will be an accompanying Isamu Noguchi Education and Resource Room, with an abundance of works by and about Noguchi as well as physical examples of his midcentury designs including the Noguchi glass table and the drool-inducing Akari paper and bamboo lamps.
To Noguchi, says Fitzgerald, “beauty belonged to everyone,” so he relished designing these elegant yet functional pieces that were at the time within average financial reach. (You do, in point of fact, have our permission to weep at our current age of built-in obsolescence, rampant enshittification and massive price inflation for anything of quality after viewing this exhibition.)
As mentioned above, there is an intensely personal lens through which to view these sculptures too — in these works Noguchi decisively reconciled the Japanese and American aspects of his identity. “He talked a lot in binary terms. When in Japan, he was too American, and here, he was too Japanese,” says Fitzgerald, before positing that in these works, he found unity.
Noguchi, she points out, said as much himself: “Here where finally opposites come together, I see a surprising purity. Stone is the depth, metal the mirror. They do not conflict.”
Metal the Mirror runs through Feb. 28, 2027, and the Mennello is the only Southeast destination of this exhibition’s tour.
6:30 p.m., Friday, Aug. 28, The Mennello Museum of American Art, 900 E. Princeton St., mennellomuseum.org.
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This article appears in Aug. 26-Sept. 1, 2026.