10/08/2026
On Tuesday night, we were honored to present the 13th annual Isamu Noguchi Award to Danh Vo and Yohji Yamamoto at the Museum’s annual benefit.
Conferred each year since 2014, the Isamu Noguchi Award recognizes creative kindred spirits whose practices carry forward ideals important to Noguchi in today’s world.
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Image: Danh Vo Danh Vo in the Noguchi Museum garden. Photo YVONNE TNT 📸 / BFA
Artist Danh Vo creates environments for exploration and contemplation, bringing objects, architecture, design, and cultural memory into dialogue.
Over the past decade, Vo has engaged in an ongoing conversation with Noguchi’s works, exploring tensions across place and time in meditative, experiential spaces.
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Image: Isamu Noguchi / Danh Vo, ‘A Cloud and Flowers,’ December 11, 2021–September 4, 2022. Mudam Luxembourg Mudam Luxembourg Photo: Nick Ash
Vo’s multidisciplinary practice, engagement with histories and the natural world, and deeply collaborative and intuitive methods echo qualities central to Noguchi’s own life and work.
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Danh Vo, Güldenhof, Germany. Photo: Nick Ash
“What I learned from Noguchi is that a stone is not different from paper—in his mind it was all the same. In societies, they are separated … But when you look deep into the Akari, they are as the stones—differently because the material is different, but the mind is all there. So that is why I engage with working with the Akari, even for myself as an artist to understand what that means … I always thought that this museum was a paradise, and one of the things that Noguchi taught me is that paradises are built when it’s needed.”
Danh Vo Danh Vo, 2026 Isamu Noguchi Award
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Photo Nicholas Knight
