The Noguchi Museum in Queens, New York, has opened an exhibition celebrating seventy-five years of Isamu Noguchi's Akari lamps, the paper and bamboo light sculptures that became one of the artist's most enduring creations. Titled No Ordinary Light: Akari at 75, the show runs from 4 November 2026 to 5 September 2027 and revisits the lamps' artistic and commercial history.

Noguchi made his first Akari during a 1951 visit to Gifu, Japan, where the town's traditional chochin lanterns inspired him to reimagine the form with an electric bulb and a modern wire base. Over the following three decades he designed more than two hundred distinct models, naming them Akari, the Japanese word for light, which to him evoked both illumination and weightlessness. The exhibition includes his largest Akari, the 200D, standing six and a half feet tall, alongside the VB 3B, a glowing pyramid tied with white stones.

The show also draws on the museum's archive, displaying five decades of Noguchi's notebooks, many on view for the first time, which reveal how systematically he developed the series. Displays revisit key moments in the lamps' history, including their debut at a tea ceremony at the home of Charles and Ray Eames in 1951 and their provocative presence in Noguchi's solo presentation at the 1986 Venice Biennale, where he was the first solo artist to represent the United States and critics deemed the radiant lamps too commercial.

To mark the anniversary, the museum is reintroducing the ST2 floor stand along with the VB1 and VB3 models from the Venice Biennale, which will retail for upwards of five hundred dollars. Those prices are far below the auction market for early pieces: a pair of 1977 V2 lamps set a record at Wright auction house in 2023, selling for 1.6 million dollars. The next twenty-five top-selling works from the past five years fetched between twenty-one thousand and forty-five thousand dollars. As co-curator Kate Wiener put it, the market for the lamps is strange — Noguchi wanted them to be accessible, open-ended editions, but the auction record tells a different story.