>> Coming Up on NYC-ARTS, a visit to the Noguchi Museum in Queens.

Founded by world-renowned sculptor Isamu Noguchi, the museum represents a legacy of a seven-decade career.

Dakin Hart: Noguchi really wanted to change sculpture in a way that made it a force for civic good.

He wanted to make it an active part of our everyday lives.

That's why he never stopped making furniture, his Akari lamp series, playgrounds, playground equipment, sets for theater and dance.

He had long collaborations with people like Martha Graham.

>> A profile of flutist Emi Ferguson, winner of a 2023 Avery Fisher Career Grant Award.

Emi Ferguson: Every day that I get to make music is just a day of great honor.

It is something that I am so proud to call my profession doing because it is able to speak to people in ways that we are not able to with our words.

>> and a look at Georgia O'Keeffe: To See Takes Time, now on view at The Museum of Modern Art.

Using charcoal, graphite, watercolor, and pastel, she developed drawings that range from observational to the abstract.

The exhibition features more than 120 works and spans more than four decades of her career.

>> FUNDING FOR NYC-ARTS IS MADE POSSIBLE BY THEA PETSCHEK IERVOLINO FOUNDATION, JODY AND JOHN ARNHOLD, THE LEWIS SONNY TURNER FUND FOR DANCE, THE AMBROSE MONELL FOUNDATION, ELISE JAFFE AND JEFFREY BROWN, CHARLES AND VALERIE DIKER, THE MILTON AND SALLY AVERY ARTS FOUNDATION, THE NANCY SIDEWATER FOUNDATION, ELROY AND TERRY KRUMHOLZ FOUNDATION, AND ELLEN AND JAMES S. MARCUS.

>> THIS PROGRAM IS SUPPORTED, IN PART, BY PUBLIC FUNDS FROM THE NEW YORK CITY DEPARTMENT OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE CITY COUNCIL ADDITIONAL FUNDING PROVIDED BY MEMBERS OF THIRTEEN.

♪ >> Good evening and welcome to NYC-ARTS.

I'm Paula Zahn on location at El Museo del Barrio right at the top of Museum Mile at Fifth Avenue and 104th Street.

El Museo was founded in 1969 by artist and educator Raphael Montanez Ortiz.

He was joined by a coalition of Puerto Rican parents, educators, artists, and activists who noted that mainstream museums largely ignored Latino artists.

Since its beginning, El Museo has been committed to celebrating and promoting Latino culture and has become a valuable resource for New York City.

El Museo's permanent collection of more than 8,500 objects, spans more than 800 years of Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino art.

Included are modern and contemporary drawings, paintings, sculptures and installations, as well as textiles, prints, photography, video and film.

Currently on view is Something Beautiful: Reframing the Coleccion, one of the museum's most ambitious presentations in more than two decades.

It features over 500 artworks, including new acquisitions and artist commissions, with the displays rotating over the course of a year.

The title, Something Beautiful, draws from prints in the collection by Marcos Dimas with a poem of the same name by Tania Niomi Ramirez.

The work both celebrates and invokes the challenges of established political, cultural, and historical doctrines.

To promote and advance new ideas, the museum engaged in dialogues with more than 40 artists, scholars, community leaders and museum professionals.

As a result, the exhibition cuts across traditional categories based on date, location and type of media, reconsidering the collection through a new lens.

On our program tonight, a trip to The Noguchi Museum in Queens.

Founded in 1985 by world-renowned sculptor, Isamu Noguchi, the museum is a culmination of his legacy.

Although he was born in Los Angeles, Noguchi spent most of his childhood in Japan, only returning to the United States for high school and college.

He began sculpting at the age of 18 and early in his career turned to abstraction.

Noguchi's relationship with organic forms and materials sparked a lifelong love of nature and public spaces.

Beyond his stonework, Noguchi is also known for his Akari light sculptures as well as set designs for the ground-breaking choreographer, Martha Graham.

The museum features Noguchi's classic monolithic sculptures along with drawings, models, and photographs from his fruitful seven-decade career.

♪ >> Noguchi was born in 1904.

He was born in Los Angeles, California.

His mother was an Irish woman from New York.

She was born in Brooklyn.

His father was a traveling poet from Japan.

Noguchi wasn't even named until he was almost three years old.

His mother just called him boy or yo.

His identity was complicated from the very first moment of his birth.

He was biracial, chose to be multicultural his whole life, but at a time when it was much harder.

He enrolled at Columbia in pre-med.

His mother felt that he was destined for bigger things than being a doctor.

Um, and by that she meant being an artist.

He was a spectacular academic sculpture at nineteen, twenty, and then very quickly realized that he was becoming the poster boy of a passe art form.

He really wanted to, uh, change sculpture in a way that made it a force for civic.

He wanted to make it a, an active part of our everyday lives.

That's why he never stopped making furniture.

His Akari lamp series.

He made playgrounds, he made playground equipment.

He made sets for theater and dance.

He had long collaborations with people like Martha Graham.

The museum was founded in 1985, but Noguchi had been here for almost 10.

He bought a derelict factory building, which is the red brick building behind me and started using it for storage and staging.

Sculpture is all about physical inconvenience.

Everything is big and heavy and takes up space and requires equipment to deal with.

So sculpturors always need more room.

He decided that in order to encapsulate his perspective or his point of view, his way of thinking of things, um, that the best thing to do was to build an institution.

And so he began to turn his private garden and space into a display space.

When the museum opened, it was seasonal or Noguchi would be here himself.

You could ring the bell and he'd come down and walk you through.

One of the things that you'll notice when you come to our museum probably right away, is that we don't have wall labels.

We do that.

Not because Noguchi hated wall labels.

When the museum first opened, there were labels identifying all the sculptures somewhere near them in a kind of traditional museum fashion, gradually he just removed them.

And it's because he wanted your experience of the work to be primary.

The fastest way to kill an artwork is to pretend that you've solved it.

The museum is really about a direct and intimate relationship with these objects and these things, and more importantly, the larger sense of an environment that they create.

They really produce an atmosphere and we're standing in this garden, which isn't even two thirds of an acre.

It's teeny tiny.

It's a postage stamp.

He called the museum an oasis on the edge of a black hole.

The black hole is New York city and the urban maelstrom.

And as small as it is, you come here and you just soak it in and you soak it in through osmosis.

It's like visiting a forest, not like going to the museum.

Maybe Noguchi's most successful sculpture overall are his Akari lanterns.

He called them lanterns rather than lamps because he said he wanted them to be, as moveable is butterflies.

The traditional paper lanterns in Gifu City specifically are made with a particular kind of continuous bamboo ribbing and washi paper.

That's made with interior bark of a Mulberry tree and it produces a laid paper that's just more durable, more flexible and more resilient than classic laid cotton paper.

Breakthrough Capestrano is made out of Japanese basalt.

A basalt column is a single crystal of basalt.

Noguchi worked with harder and harder stones because he wanted the material to resist him.

What he really liked was stones that had already been marked by some process that he would then incorporate into the work.

You can see the lines of drill holes.

Those drill holes were made manually with hand drills, and then they'll push two bamboo wedges into the hole and fill the hole with water.

The bamboo wedges expand enough to crack the stone.

Noguchi loved that and he loved the product of this breaking process.

So he would take these stones columns and set them upright, cut off the bottom so that it would stand up and then make his few adjustments to turn them into sculpture, in air quotes.

The Well that's right behind me, this wonderful variation on tsukubai that is a circulating fountain.

The water just cascades out over the stone.

That's another one of those basalt columns just lobbed off with a coring drill, making a hole in it.

Some of these sculptures are eroding, but the trees are growing.

Their relationship to each other is changing constantly over time.

He planted all of the trees.

So the magnificent katsura tree that provides the canopy that dominates the garden.

It really was a sprig.

It was a quarter inch sapling, and now you see what that's become.

And that's why the heart and soul of the Noguchi Museum is this garden.

♪ >> Next we'll celebrate the 2023 Avery Fisher Career Grant Awards.

This year the ceremony took place in March at the Jerome L. Greene Performance Space at WQXR.

These individual grants of $25,000 give professional assistance and recognition to talented instrumentalists who have great potential for major careers in classical music.

This year, there were five recipients.

double bassist Nina Bernat.

Guitarist Bokyung Byuna, flutist Emi Ferguson, pianist Evren Ozelâ, as well as the Isidore String Quartet.

Born in Japan and raised in London and Boston, Emi Ferguson brings her love of music to audiences around the globe, with contemporary takes on music of the past.

Trained at Juilliard as a flutist, Emi has released several solo recordings including her debut indie-pop album, "Amour Creula" which was inspired by the music of the 17th century French court.

She frequently performs with the New York New Music Ensemble and the Manhattan Chamber Players right here in New York, as well as the Camerata Pacifica in California.

Emi Ferguson: I think it's an, an understatement to say that the Avery Fisher Career Grant will have an enormous impact on my life and my career.

It is a huge, huge gift.

I feel just so incredibly honored to be part of this legacy of performers.

But the thing I think I always wanted to play was the flute.

And so when I was six years old, my parents said yes.

We were living in London at the time, and we went to the local flute shop and we picked up my flute and I came home and I opened it upside down and it fell out all over the floor.

So I play lots of different kinds of flutes, that are all within the Western classical tradition.

And I play the silver modern flute that is probably really familiar to everybody, and every note has that same beautiful even tone.

But this wasn't always the case.

In fact, this was really a development of the 20th century before that these instruments didn't have that sort of equality of sound, and that was actually the thing that composers loved.

They loved the fact that each note had a slightly different character, and it was able for them to evoke these very different flavors in different pieces, whether they wrote in one key or the other.

So I'm really excited to be playing Isabella Leonardo's Sonata Duodecima.

And Isabella Leonardo was this trailblazing 17th century Italian nun who was writing this incredible music.

I mean, you'll hear it and I fell completely in love with it.

There was just one thing standing in my way, which it didn't really stand in my way, is that it's written for the violin.

But throughout history, flute players and violin players have often sort of borrowed from each other, and especially in the Baroque period, this was a very, very common practice.

I'm really excited that I'm going to be playing her Sonata Duodecima with my incredible colleague Matthew Aucoin on the piano.

And we'll be doing this brand new arrangement.

Matt is actually going to be improvising and sort of making that up from the structure that she gives us in the moment.

♪ >> I think for so many musicians who go through conservatory training within the classical world, we start to develop baggage towards some of this incredibly iconic music, works by Bach, works by Mozart.

We have so few female composers that are part of our cannon in Western classical music.

And Isabella Leonardo is a shining beacon of someone who sort of persevered and wrote this incredible music despite the obstacles that were placed in front of her as a woman.

And we have other incredible examples as well, who are many hundreds of years earlier, like Hildegard von Bingen, who was also a, a nun who wrote amazing groundbreaking music.

I feel really honored to be able to continue their legacy and to get to play their music today and keep it alive because it's just, it's amazing.

♪ >> Every day that I get to make music is just a day of great honor.

It is something that I am so proud to call my profession and I love doing because it is able to speak to people in ways that we are not able to with our words.

♪ >> Now, a look at the exhibition Georgia O'Keeffe: To See Takes Time on view at the Museum of Modern Art.

In 1946 Georgia O'Keeffe made history as the first woman artist to have a retrospective at MoMA.

This is the first exhibition devoted to the artist since then.

Using charcoal, graphite, watercolor, and pastel, she developed drawings that range from observational to the abstract.

The exhibition features more than 120 works and spans more than four decades of her career.

This gathering of drawings by the artist illuminates her innovative practice; some were executed in rapid succession, others over longer periods of time.

In O'Keeffe's breakthrough period of 1915-18, she made as many works on paper as she would over the rest of her life.

An abstract sequence might comprise of several nearly identical compositions.

An example of this is her Evening Star series, which gradually loses its bold lines in favor of softer colors and shapes.

In other works, O'Keeffe would progressively pare down an elaborate arrangement such as her Blue series.

Some of these works on paper gave rise to related paintings, which are installed alongside them.

One example is the transformation of âDrawing I into the oil series It Was Yellow and Pink.

Although O'Keeffe is best known for her flowing natural forms, she also created portraits.

In this exhibition, O'Keeffe strived to express how a single depiction cannot fully capture the complexity of a person.

This is shown in her works of fellow artist, Beauford Delaney.

Georgia O'Keeffe: To See Takes Time is on view through August 12.

>> Next week on NYC-Arts a profile of renowned photographer Joel Meyerowitz, a vibrant presence in the art world since the 1960s.

Joel Meyerowitz: I remember walking through Paris and suddenly you smell baking croissants on the air, butter and sugar.

Ah!

And you immediately you want a croissant or a cookie or something, right?

And then you take two steps and it's gone.

To me that's what photography is.

You walk along the street and something happens and you get it.

It is a visual that is as precise as that fragrance that is only in the air of the doorway.

>> a visit to the American Folk Art Museum and the exhibition Material Witness: Folk and Self Taught Arts at Work.

Brooke Wyatt: Material Witness focuses on of course the materials and the substances like clay, wood, rock, stone, metal that artists work with to make the objects that are in this museum's collection.

>> And a look at Monet to Morisot: The Real and Imagined in European Art now view at the Brooklyn Museum.

Lisa Small: This exhibition brings together a really important part of Brooklyn's European collection.

It's 19th and early-20th century European art.

We have organized it under the broad theme of the real and the imagined, which was really evocative and flexible in terms of these disparate works.

♪ >> I hope you enjoyed our program tonight.

I'm Paula Zahn on location at El Museo del Barrio.

Thanks so much for joining us.

Good night.

♪ >> FUNDING FOR NYC-ARTS IS MADE POSSIBLE BY THEA PETSCHEK IERVOLINO FOUNDATION.

JODY AND JOHN ARNHOLD.

THE LEWIS SONNY TURNER FUND FOR DANCE.

THE AMBROSE MONELL FOUNDATION.

ELISE JAFFE AND JEFFREY BROWN.

CHARLES AND VALERIE DIKER.

THE MILTON AND SALLY AVERY ARTS FOUNDATION.

THE NANCY SIDEWATER FOUNDATION.

ELROY AND TERRY KRUMHOLZ FOUNDATION.

AND ELLEN AND JAMES S. MARCUS.

THIS PROGRAM IS SUPPORTED, IN PART, BY PUBLIC FUNDS FROM THE NEW YORK CITY DEPARTMENT OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE CITY COUNCIL.

ADDITIONAL FUNDING PROVIDED BY MEMBERS OF THIRTEEN.