ORLANDO, FLA.- The Mennello Museum of American Art is presenting Metal the Mirror, an exhibition featuring nine hot-dipped galvanized steel sculptures by Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988), from August 28, 2026, through February 28, 2027. Organized by Art Bridges, it is the first presentation of Noguchi’s work in Central Florida in more than two decades.

Conceived of in 1982–83, near the end of Noguchi’s six-decade career, each sculpture is cut from a single sheet of steel with a plasma torch, folded, and dipped in boiling zinc. The process leaves surfaces that are subtly mottled and mirror-bright — surfaces that will keep changing as the metal takes on a patina. Metal the Mirror is the Mennello Museum’s first large-scale indoor sculpture exhibition and the only Southeast venue on the exhibition’s national tour.

“Here is where finally opposites come together, I see a surprising purity. Stone is the depth, metal the mirror. They do not conflict.” — Isamu Noguchi

“Noguchi’s work is being reconsidered across the country right now, and Orlando should be part of that conversation,” said Shannon Fitzgerald, Executive Director of the Mennello Museum of American Art. “He spent a career refusing the lines the rest of us draw — between sculpture and design, between East and West, between art and daily life. These nine works make that argument in a single room, and they make it at close range, in surfaces that hold your reflection while you look.”

The Mennello will pair the sculptures with the Isamu Noguchi Education and Resource Room, a furnished space where visitors can sit with the artist’s design work rather than view it behind a rope. “That was always the point for him,” Fitzgerald said. “Sculpture you could live with.”

“This exhibition examines how sculptor Isamu Noguchi confronted rigid binary structures through metal,” said Julia Mun, Assistant Curator at Art Bridges. “Sharing this nuanced narrative with audiences in Orlando — many of whom might be seeing Noguchi’s work in person for the first time — is exactly the kind of exchange our partnerships hope to make possible.”

The Exhibition

While Noguchi is best known for his work in stone, he experimented continually with new materials and methods. He first worked with aluminum in the 1950s and turned to galvanized steel later in his career, producing a series of twenty-six sculptures with the Los Angeles workshop Gemini G.E.L. Writing about their materiality, Noguchi set metal as a mirror against “stone [as] depth.” The galvanized steel works hold that opposition together, along with several others: traditional and modern, fine art and design, industry and nature. As a Japanese American artist, Noguchi negotiated a persistent sense of in-betweenness throughout his career. These sculptures make it material — metal, which he associated with the United States, cut and folded using kirigami techniques drawn from Japanese craft.





The exhibition is arranged in three thematic groupings that underscore the paradoxes of Noguchi’s work in metal. In the first, he gives human qualities to inanimate forms, complicating the relationship between flesh and steel, body and mirror. In the second, industrial material becomes mountain, fruit, and sky — an argument that in modernity, industry and nature are inseparable. A final trio turns to abstraction, setting theory against spirit, weight against weightlessness, and past against present.

The Isamu Noguchi Education and Resource Room

Presented in conjunction with the exhibition, the Mennello Museum's Isamu Noguchi Education and Resource Room will provide visitors the opportunity to learn about Noguchi’s life and extensive legacy beyond his steel sculptures. It will feature the Noguchi Rudder Table, originally designed by Noguchi for Herman Miller in 1944 and reintroduced for production by the company in 2013.

The room also holds a small library of books and prints from The Noguchi Museum and a selection of Akari Light Sculptures. Noguchi began designing the paper-and-bamboo lamps after a 1951 visit to Gifu, Japan, a town known for producing lanterns and umbrellas from mulberry-bark paper and bamboo. Akari means light as illumination, with an implication of weightlessness. Noguchi likened them to falling leaves and cherry blossoms and called them “poetic, ephemeral, and tentative.” He was fond of saying that a room, a tatami, and Akari were all anyone needed to start a home.

Isamu Noguchi

Noguchi’s career spanned more than six decades and extended well past sculpture into gardens, furniture, lighting, ceramics, architecture, landscape, and stage design. His use of industrial materials, his sculptural abstraction, and his blending of Eastern and Western aesthetics earned him national and international recognition in his lifetime.

A Guggenheim Fellowship took the young Noguchi to Paris in 1927, where he worked as a studio assistant to Constantin Brancusi — a rare position for any artist, and rarer still for an American, as Brancusi was famously reluctant to take assistants. In 1986, Noguchi became the first artist to be given the United States Pavilion at the Venice Biennale alone. In his final decade, he received the Edward MacDowell Medal for Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to the Arts (1982), the Kyoto Prize in Arts (1986), the National Medal of Arts (1987), and Japan’s Order of the Sacred Treasure (1988).