Isamu Noguchi, born in Los Angeles in 1904 as the son of the Japanese poet Yone Noguchi and the American writer Leonie Gilmour, studied at Columbia University and the Leonardo da Vinci Art School. He then founded his first studio and received a Guggenheim scholarship in 1927. He then worked as Constantin Brancusi's assistant in Paris and held his first exhibition in New York. He studied brush drawing in China and worked with clay at Jinmatsu Uno in Japan.