Isamu Noguchi's Skyviewing Sculpture was created by invitation for Western Washington University, north of Seattle, in 1969. The 14-foot high sculpture, which sits in the university's central quad, acts as an observatory, encouraging viewers to enter and turn their gaze to the sky. 'Skyviewing' was a leitmotif in Noguchi's art throughout his long career as an artist and landscape architect, from his early work alongside Constantin Brancusi in Paris in 1928 to his death in 1988. Some sculptures act as reflecting telescopes with polished stone that mirror the firmament while others trace the path of the sun with cast shadows or lead the eye up towards the sky. The work at Western invites the viewer in, and guides the eye upwards to observe the sky in all of its variety. Looking Up explores Noguchi's work on the themes of space, and our place in the universe; examines the changing artistic climate during his long career; and places Noguchi in context with a younger generation of artists, including Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, James Turrell, and Charles Ross. The book includes essays by leading specialists, as well as a plate section and contemporary photos of the creation, transportation and installation of Skyviewing Sculpture .

At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. The Hasegawa Reader is an open access companion to the bilingual catalogue copublished with The Noguchi Museum to accompany an international touring exhibition, Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan. The exhibition features the work of two artists who were friends and contemporaries: Isamu Noguchi and Saburo Hasegawa. This volume is intended to give scholars and general readers access to a wealth of archival material and writings by and about Saburo Hasegawa. While Noguchi's reputation as a preeminent American sculptor of the twentieth century only grows stronger, Saburo Hasegawa is less well known, despite being considered the most literate artist in Japan during his lifetime (1906-1957). Hasegawa is credited with introducing abstraction in Japan in the mid 1930s, and he worked as an artist in diverse media including oil and ink painting, photography, and printmaking. He was also a theorist and widely published essayist, curator, teacher, and multilingual conversationalist. This valuable trove of Hasegawa material includes the entire manuscript for a 1957 Hasegawa memorial volume, with its beautiful essays by philosopher Alan Watts, Oakland Museum Director Paul Mills, and Japan Times art writer Elise Grilli, as well as various unpublished writings by Hasegawa. The ebook edition will also include a dozen essays by Hasegawa from the postwar period, and one prewar essay, professionally translated for this publication to give a sense of Hasegawa's voice. This resource will be an invaluable tool for scholars and students interested in midcentury East Asian and American art and tracing the emergence of contemporary issues of hybridity, transnationalism, and notions of a "global Asia."

In May 1950 Isamu Noguchi (1904-88) returned to Japan for his first visit in 20 years. He was, Noguchi said, seeking models for evolving the relationship between sculpture and society-having emerged from the war years with a profound desire to reorient his work "toward some purposeful social end." The artist Saburo Hasegawa (1906-57) was a key figure for Noguchi during this period, making introductions to Japanese artists, philosophies, and material culture. Hasegawa, who had mingled with the European avant-garde during time spent as a painter in Paris in the 1930s, was, like Noguchi, seeking an artistic hybridity. By the time Hasegawa and Noguchi met, both had been thinking deeply about the balance between tradition and modernity, and indigenous and foreign influences, in the development of traditional cultures for some time. The predicate of their intense friendship was a thorough exploration of traditional Japanese culture within the context of seeking what Noguchi termed "an innocent synthesis" that "must rise from the embers of the past." Changing and Unchanging Things is an account of how their joint exploration of traditional Japanese culture influenced their contemporary and subsequent work. The 40 masterpieces in the exhibition-by turns elegiac, assured, ambivalent, anguished, euphoric, and resigned-are organized into the major overlapping subjects of their attention: the landscapes of Japan, the abstracted human figure, the fragmentation of matter in the atomic age, and Japan's traditional art forms. Published in association with The Noguchi Museum. Exhibition dates: Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan: January 12-March 21, 2019 The Noguchi Museum, New York: May 1-July 14, 2019 Asian Art Museum, San Francisco: September 27-December 8, 2019