Edwina von Gal, 2018 Isamu Noguchi Award Honoree
Channel: The Noguchi Museum
Date: 2018-05-26

The Isamu Noguchi Award was established in 2014 by The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, NY, to honor the tenets that Isamu Noguchi expressed in his life’s work and to acknowledge other like-minded, highly accomplished individuals who reflect similar ideals in their own times. The Award thus celebrates innovation, global awareness, and Eastern and Western exchange. It is presented annually at the Museum's Spring Benefit.

On May 22, 2018, the 2018 Award was presented to landscape designer Edwina von Gal and industrial designer Naoto Fukasawa.

Edwina von Gal has been principal of her eponymous U.S.-based landscape design firm since 1984, creating landscapes with a focus on simplicity and sustainability. She has collaborated with architects including Frank Gehry, Richard Gluckman, Annabelle Selldorf, Maya Lin, and Richard Meier, on projects for numerous people in the design and art community, among others. Von Gal’s work has been published widely and her book “Fresh Cuts” won the Quill and Trowel award for garden writing. In 2008, she founded the Azuero Earth Project, promoting reforestation on Panama’s Azuero Peninsula. In 2013, she created the nonprofit Perfect Earth Project, dedicated to raising awareness of the dangers to people, pets, and the planet of toxic lawn and garden chemicals.

Von Gal received the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art’s Arthur Ross Award in 2012, and was the 2017 recipient of Guild Hall’s Academy of the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award for the Visual Arts. In addition to the Isamu Noguchi Award, von Gal will receive the NY School of Interior Design’s Green Design Award in 2018.

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Video credits:
Directed by Alex Meillier
Edited by Efrat Kashai
Produced by Tanya Ager Meillier, Ager Meillier Films Inc. (ager-meillier.com)
Music by Michael Brook. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.