Noah Purifoy's Joshua Tree Outdoor Museum
Assemblage artist Noah Purifoy was born in 1917 in Alabama. He fought in World War II, came back and soon fled to Los Angeles. After the Watts riots of the mid-1960s, he collected burned materials that ended up in his art. Purifoy had a creative solution to dealing with injustice. Instead of evaporating or being silent, he took these things — pieces of wreckage — and turned them into works of art, a meditation on one’s life, one’s work, one’s history. This is the most powerful act.
Even though he died in 2004, Purifoy is still teaching us in these 10 acres of a hundred or so sculptures in the Joshua Tree Outdoor Museum. He moved there when he was priced out of Los Angeles, in a way that is so similar to gentrification today.
From “Lost and Found” by Photographer Latoya Ruby Frazier as told to Jaime Lowe for the New York Times, 2016; Photo of Pat Brunty, the museum caretaker, by Frazier
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