For the past decade, the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum has presented solo exhibitions featuring contemporary artists whose practices resonate with the work of the museum’s namesake. Artists are invited to make new works in response to the museum’s extensive archive and collection. Sculptor Temitayo Ogunbiyi is the most recent artist to be invited into this program. She will debut two new commissions along with a survey of more than seventeen years of work in Temitayo Ogunbiyi, You will wonder if we would have been friends. 

After moving to Nigeria in 2011, Ogunbiyi became interested in playgrounds, after noting how few of them there were for her own children. She could find only a limited number of safe and well-maintained places for play, and those that did exist lacked features to satisfy a curious young mind and inspire creativity. Playground design became the artist’s medium as she produced sculptures expressly intended to be played with, open-ended in form and meaning. Ogunbiyi works in bronze, brass, and rope, materials that have deep cultural significance in Nigeria. Incorporating concrete and rubber too, her objects and structures are further inspired by the improvised work-out equipment commonly found in public spaces in Lagos. The artist’s methods and research naturally led her to Noguchi, who himself was fascinated by concepts of nondirected play and imaginative public space.

For the exhibition at the Noguchi Museum, Ogunbiyi will produce two new large-scale public sculptures. One of the commissioned pieces will be used for play while the other will be playable, like an instrument, with a musician invited to create a score for the work. Both projects will feature details pulled from Ogunbiyi’s research into Noguchi’s archive.