The Life of Isamu Noguchi : Journey without Borders

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Summary: sculptor, heartlander, world traveler, aka
Review: "Sam" Gilmour, heartlander, great sculptor, world traveler, free spirit, aka "Noguchi"--
The sadly neglected tale of a shy 13 year-old boy traveling alone to LaPorte, Indiana for early schooling "as a true American" and known there as "Sam" Gilmour, was later to become widely known as one of the world's greatest sculptors -- Isamu Noguchi (a future Jeopardy question?). A new biography "The Life of Isamu Noguchi: Journey Without Borders" includes revealing details and childhood snapshots for the first time from the archives of Lilly Library at Indiana University. This biography, only recently published in English, unfolds like a panoramic tapestry of life ... colorful, insightful, personal. It includes his stressful adaptations to cultural duality, personal relationships with notable companions, and his bonding with the idea of "mound builders" of native Americans.

After traveling alone across the ocean and the country, he began his new, Midwestern experience by hiking down the remote dirt road for the first time past the farms, fields, and woods to the Interlaken boarding school, feeling overwhelmed by the "vastness, the sweep, the panorama of that open Indiana countryside." Soon, when fateful WW I events abruptly closed the boarding school, he lived alone on the abandoned premises for a month "like Daniel Boone". Finally good fortune had him transferring to the public LaPorte High School and living with a locally prominent family in town, he graduated four years later in 1922. Typically, he had a newspaper route. Aspiring to be an "all-American boy", the yearbook included his illustrations and classmates elected him "Biggest Bull-Head."

And so goes the first 100 pages. The next 340 pages of this epic follow his footprints through the Sands of Time, continuing 'Sam's Splendid Adventure' to the peaks of artistic expression in dance theatre, architecture, and sculpture. Along the way, this "Hoosier" sojourns with many of the greatest artistic spirits this world has ever seen.

On a very personal note, I met with Noguchi a couple of times ('70s) in my New York work, and had once played a basketball game ('50s) at his Indiana high school (big deal there, then). Regrettably, I didn't realize at the time that our paths had previously crossed, albeit if only in space-time. Somewhere, sometime, "somewhat" dedicated individuals must necessarily put out a wake-up call to the Arts in Indiana patrons at colleges, museums, and libraries on this wholly unusual and neglected chapter of American cultural history at the turn of the 20th Century with its demographic changes of nation building immigration, new industrialization, and new urbanism. Fittingly, the Noguchi Foundation has an extensive curriculum guide available. His centennial birth date is November 17, 2004.