Isamu Noguchi was born in San Francisco in 1904 but moved to Japan as a child. He returned to the USA in his teens and  enrolled as a pre-med student at Columbia University, but part-time sculpture classes and exposure to the New York art world caused him to leave college and pursue sculpture full-time. He applied for and received a Guggenheim Fellowship after seeing an exhibition of Constantin Brancusi's work, and by 1927 was working in that artist's Paris studio.