My last day of 2015 was spent in California’s Mojave Desert, just about 2 hours from Los Angeles, strolling through the palpable legacy of Noah Purifoy (1917-2004) at the Joshua Tree Outdoor Museum. Surrounded by Purifoy’s assemblage installations, I reflected on a year of thought-provoking art, my own curatorial transnational connections, and those who are faced with the fragility of movement in the world.
The assemblages are constructed with discarded objects across a dusty plot of land—a railroad with bicycle wheels and beer kegs; TV’s stacked on top of each other; bowling balls dangling down; towers of lunch trays; churches and graveyards; a washroom for whites and coloreds. Purifoy’s work is a playful and serious engagement with what is left behind after migration and movement. Although named an outdoor museum, the space doesn’t feel remotely like a museum; the works transcend locality in a way that forces a quiet that felt both symbolic and spiritual on the last day of the year.
Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada at the Los Angeles County Museum inspired our visit to the cold but gorgeous desert. Purifoy is most known for his work after the 1965 Watts Riots in Los Angeles. The riots in Watts, a predominantly Black neighborhood, were incredibly violent, with many residents shot and killed over the course of a week. The community rose in response to the vicious state violence, police brutality and economic oppression by taking it to the streets. Purifoy, the first director of the Watts Tower Art Center, felt drawn to the lingering traces of what remained after the violence had ceased. One of his earlier sculpture works came out of the charred debris of the Watts Riots. In the catalogue for the landmark group exhibition 66 Signs of Neon (1965) Purifoy reflects on his engagement with the found object:
“Despite the involvement of running an art school, we gave much thought to the oddity of our found things. Often the smell of the debris, as our work brought us into the vicinity of the storage area, turned our thoughts to what were and were not tragic times in Watts and to what to do with the junk we had collected, which had begun to haunt our dreams.”
66 Signs of Neon was co-curated by Purifoy and travelled to nine venues between 1966 and 1969. Purifoy, together with artist Judson Powell, created the first of the works featured. 66 Signs poses the question: How does one deal with the aftermath of grim riots in a post Second World War context? The exhibition catalogue reflects on how the two artists decided to build “a sculptured garden” with the found objects. The two had first envisioned the exhibition as a kind of supplement to the McCone Report, which detailed the findings of the Governor’s Commission on the causes of the riots. The exhibition was meant to stress the importance of art education. Both Purifoy and Powell felt that “creativity is the only way left for a person to find himself in this materialistic world.” Purifoy’s relationship to materialism was informed by the racial dynamics at the time and influenced the relationship he developed with the arts. From the oral history project it becomes clear that Purifoy was intentional about his disengagement from the American racialized economic structure. Purifoy defined, on his own terms, social mobility:
“(…)I wanted to experience us [Blacks] at the level where we lived at. That [resulted in] my self-imposed poverty in my art years. I did not want lots of money or lots of clothes or anything like that. I wanted to experience what's it like to be poor. I could have been not poor, but it was self- imposed poverty.”1
Read more here: http://www.warscapes.com/reviews/noah-purifoy-and-migrating-assemblages