Just a little over 40 years ago, an 80-year-old Isamu Noguchi opened a sculpture garden and museum along the East River in Long Island City, Queens. In a 1985 article about its opening—the first American institution to be established by a living artist to display their own work—Noguchi told Douglas McGill of the New York Times that he intended for it to be “a metaphor for the world.” It’s no wonder that, for Noguchi, “a metaphor for the world” was to be in New York City, his adopted home and creative nucleus.

“I’m really a New Yorker,” the Los Angeles–born sculptor, furniture designer, and landscape artist said in a late-career interview. “Not Japanese, not a citizen of the world, just a New Yorker who goes wandering around like many New Yorkers.” Noguchi spent most of his childhood in Japan and his teenage years in Indiana. At 17, he moved to New York City, first Manhattan and then Long Island City, which would become his home on-and-off for the next six decades.

Curated by Kate Wiener, a new retrospective at the Noguchi Museum—on view until September 13—traces the artist’s enduring fascination with the city and his relentless pursuit to better it through public works. Loosely organized in a chronological framework, Noguchi’s New York follows him through cultural and political touchstones of the 20th century, from the New Deal and its impact on artists’ relationship to civic life to the counterculture movements of the 1950s and 60s.

The exhibition starts on the ground floor, situating visitors in the 1980s at the genesis of the museum. Photos of the sculpture garden in its infancy and an early brochure grace the wall. Upstairs, the rest of the retrospective plays out, featuring a wide selection of works, including sketches for his first public commission in the United States, News (1938–40); This Tortured Earth (1942–43) and Yellow Landscape (1943), which he made following his experience in a Japanese internment camp; recreations of set pieces he designed for Martha Graham’s controversial dance show Phaedra (1962); and early mock-ups of his installation Red Cube (1968) in the Financial District.

Models of his unrealized proposals for the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation assume a central role in the exhibition. Play Mountain (1933), Noguchi’s first scheme for the city, was to take up an entire city block in Manhattan. The sloping structure was swiftly rejected by then-parks commissioner Robert Moses, who would go on to foil many more of Noguchi’s plans. Less than a decade later, Noguchi would pitch the Parks Department play structures—perhaps the most conventional of his submissions—which were spurned on the grounds of them being unsafe for children. In a defiant move, Noguchi followed up with Contour Playground (1941), as there was no part of it a child could fall off. In the early 1950s, Noguchi submitted another curious plaza for the United Nations playground competition. Moses’s animosity toward the design was so great that he threatened to order the Parks Department not to maintain it if it was eventually built.

Perhaps the greatest setback was the unraveling of Noguchi’s Riverside Playground proposal, which he collaborated with Louis Kahn on from 1961 to 1965. The structure, which borrows motifs from Play Mountain, was to occupy a four block radius in Riverside Park on the Upper West Side. The exhibition features several models of the playscape, as well as blueprints. Following a taxpayer lawsuit, newly elected mayor John Lindsay terminated the project.

Accompanying these scrapped schemes are hand-painted animations, created by Jack Cunningham and Nicolas Ménard of Eastend Western, which bring Noguchi’s projects to life. The style of the animations is almost akin to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s illustrations for The Little Prince or, the lesser known, 1982 British film The Snowman. As buoyant children gleefully sled down Play Mountain and swing from Noguchi’s spindly play structures, it’s hard not to yearn to join them.

“Like a lot of New Yorkers, I was one of those bitten by some kind of an idealism,” reads a Noguchi quote displayed on a wall near the exhibition’s entry. His idealism pulsates through the retrospective. Rejected time and time again by the city, Noguchi still worked to bring his fertile imagination to its streets. New York City may never get to host his sublime playscapes, but one hopes we can carry forth his optimism.