Gardens have been formative playgrounds for great artists at least since Michelangelo spent his teenage years poring over antiquities in the Medici gardens in Florence. But few artists have made gardens as central to their work as Isamu Noguchi, whose museum and sculpture garden in Long Island City, Queens, turns 30 this year.

“When the time came for me to work with larger spaces,” Noguchi (1904-88) once said, “I conceived them as gardens, not as sites with objects but as relationships to a whole.”