On Friday, November 20, the outgoing First Lady Melania Trump unveiled a new artwork at the White House Rose Garden — Isamu Noguchi’s 1962 sculpture “Floor Frame.” Noguchi is the first Asian-American artist to enter the national collection.
The White House Historical Association acquired the two-part bronze for $125,000 at a Sotheby’s auction in March. “The art piece is humble in scale, complements the authority of the Oval Office, & represents the important contributions of Asian American artists,” Melania Trump recently tweeted.
A White House press release states that Noguchi viewed the sculpture “as the intersection of a tree and the ground, taking on the qualities of both an implied root system and the canopy of a tree.”
The statement continues: “In order to reconnect viewers to the planet, he envisioned the sculpture placed directly on the ground. The sculpture placement on the terrace in the Rose Garden allows visitors to happen upon it, giving it a found quality.”
Noguchi was born in Los Angeles in 1904 to an American mother and a Japanese father. He became a political activist after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, and he cofounded Nisei Writers and Artists Mobilization for Democracy. The group was dedicated to raising awareness of the patriotism of Japanese-Americans. Noguchi later entered the Colorado River Relocation Center (Poston) internment camp in Arizona, where he remained for six months in order to create a more humane design for the camp and organize workshops and lectures on Japanese art. His work later became the subject of the 2017 exhibition Self-Interned, 1942: Noguchi in Poston War Relocation Center at the Noguchi Museum in New York.
