Minoru Niizuma immigrated to the United States in 1959 and began teaching at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, where he taught until 1970. In a 1977 interview with Kathryn Tolbert for the Greenwich Time, Niizuma notes that “the problem of space was why I couldn’t work or exhibit extensively in Japan.” In New York, the artist had an 8,000 square foot studio a few blocks from Columbia University--where he taught sculpture from 1972 until 1984--which allowed him to freely create sculptures without size restrictions.