On the centennial anniversary of the birth of artist Toshiko Takaezu (1922–2011), The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum announced its forthcoming major touring retrospective and monograph centered on her work and life. This will be the first nationally touring retrospective of Takaezu’s work in over twenty years. To coincide with the exhibition, the Museum will publish a new monograph in association with Yale University Press. Also titled Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within, it represents the most ambitious monograph on an American ceramic artist to date.

The retrospective is organized by The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum with assistance from the Toshiko Takaezu Foundation and the Takaezu family. It is co-curated by art historian Glenn Adamson, Noguchi Museum Curator Kate Wiener, and composer and sound artist Leilehua Lanzilotti. The exhibition was conceived and developed with former Noguchi Museum Senior Curator Dakin Hart. The show at The Noguchi Museum will feature approximately 200 works from private and public collections around the country. Following its presentation at The Noguchi Museum, the exhibition will travel to several additional venues across the United States.

Featuring approximately 200 objects from public and private collections across the country, Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within will present a comprehensive portrait of Takaezu’s life and work. This chronological retrospective will chart the development of Takaezu’s hybrid practice over seven decades, documenting her early student work in Hawai‘i and at the Cranbrook Academy through her years teaching at the Cleveland Institute of Art and later at Princeton University. To represent this evolution, the show will present a series of installations loosely inspired by ones that Takaezu created in her own lifetime: from a set table of functional wares from the early 1950s to an immersive constellation of monumental ceramic forms from the late 1990s to early 2000s.