Noah Purifoy’s Outdoor Museum
Noah Purifoy, Untitled (Car Parts II), 1992. Photo © Open Air Foto.
The desert is rich in arts culture but one of Joshua Tree’s cultural crown jewels is The Noah Purifoy Desert Art Museum of Assemblage Art. It is the land where the artist spent the last fifteen years of his life building the 10 acre museum that contains large scale assemblages constructed entirely from junked materials.
Noah Purifoy (1917-2004) is best known for his assemblage sculpture. Originally born in Snowhill, Alabama, he was one of 13 children and the son of a sharecropper. During WW II, he served in a segregated US Navy as a Seabee.
In 1948 he recieved a graduate degree from Atlanta University and became a social worker. Soon after, Noah took a position in Cleveland, Ohio and in 1950 he moved to Los Angeles taking a job at the County Hospital. Just shy of his fortieth birthday, Purifoy had switched paths and earned a BFA degree from Chouinard, now CalArts. He was the first African-American to graduate from the college.
His earliest body of sculpture, constructed out of charred debris from the 1965 Watts riots, was the basis for 66 Signs of Neon, the landmark 1966 group exhibition on the Watts riots that traveled throughout the country. As a founding director of the Watts Towers Art Center, Purifoy knew the community intimately. For the 20 years that followed the rebellion, Purifoy dedicated himself to the found object, and to using art as a tool for social change.
In the late 1980s, after 11 years of public policy work for the California Arts Council, where Purifoy initiated programs such as Artists in Social Institutions, which brought art into the state prison system.
In 1989 (at 72), he moved to a friend's trailer in Joshua Tree -While giving the appearance of a salvage yard with tires, bathroom fixtures, TVs, ragged clothes, toys and vacuum cleaners, each piece has a rich story to tell.
Congratulations to the Noah Purifoy Foundation, established in 1998, for their big grant to continue to maintain and preserve this gem. A big thanks to local artists, Teri Rommelmann and Rick Granados of Duotone, for their docent tour. We felt the love and inspiration.
The museum is open to the public every day of the year from sun up until sundown and is free of charge.
The Noah Purifoy Desert Art Museum of Assemblage Art
63030 Blair Lane, Joshua Tree, California 92252
All photos by Open Air Foto.
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