Noah Purifoy Exhibit at LACMA

I roamed through the Noah Purifoy exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of art yesterday.  The exhibit is entitled "Junk Dada," so I expected to see arranged junk statues.  Instead, I saw beautiful art created from recycled materials (yes, junk, but beautiful).
I learned the following about Noah Purifoy:

He was born on August 17, 1917 in Snow Hill, Alabama to sharecropper cotton picking parents, the son and daughter of slaves, where he learned to make something out of nothing.  He attended the Snow Hill Institute, a school for the African American community that was modeled on the nearby Tuskegee Institute.  He later lived in Birmingham until moving to Los Angeles in 1950 at age 33 to attend Chouinard Art Institute, now a part of CalArts. Here he was introduced to Marcel Duchamp and others and their assemblage art that was part of the Surrealist and Dadist art movement.  He also saw Simon Rodia's towers in Watts and later became founding director of the Watts Towers Art Center where art was taught to the community.

Purifoy received his Masters in Social Work and believed in the power of art to effect change.  "On August 11, 1965, the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts erupted in one of the most violent race rebellions in American history.  A reaction to decades of oppression, economic disenfranchisement, and racial profiling endured by the African American community, the revolt left thirty-four people dead and devastated Watts, which was engulfed by fire for a week.  In the riot's wake, Purifoy, the founding director of the Watts Towers Art Center, gathered a group of artists...together, they created '66 Signs of Neon,' an exhibition of works constructed from the debris they had collected...'66 Signs of Neon' traveled to nine venues across the country between 1966 and 1969" (quoted from the exhibit description).

In 1972, Purifoy became director of community services at Central City Mental Health, a facility started in 1968 to address the psychological issues affecting L.A.'s African American community. In 1976 Purifoy was appointed by Governor Jerry Brown to the California Arts Council where he served for 12 years. In 1989, at the age of seventy-two, Purifoy moved to Joshua Tree, CA where he transformed a ten-acre parcel of desert with 120 large-scale sculptures composed entirely of junk.  Six of these large-scale works are installed in this exhibit, two outside.

Noah Purifoy died on March 5, 2004 in Joshua Tree.

Here are my photos of some of the art work that I enjoyed:

"Wooden Tile," 1988, Construction

"Untitled," n.d. Assemblage sculpture

"Black, Brown, and Beige (After Duke Ellington)," 1989, Combine

"Snow Hill," 1989, Construction.
This works depicts Purifoy's birthplace of Snow Hill Alabama, from the air.

"Joshua Tree," 1989, Mixed-media construction

"Untitled (Bed Headboard)," 1958, Construction.  This headboard, Purifoy's earliest surviving work, was made during his eleven-year career as a designer of modernist furniture.

"Urban Sprawl," 1989

"Office Chair," 1988

"The Last Supper II," 1988, Assemblage

"Charisma," 1989

"Zulu," 1989, Construction

"Rags and Old Iron I (After Nina Simone)," 1989 Assemblage
Purifoy referenced jazz in numerous works from the late 1980's.  Simone wails in the song "Rags and Old Iron." 

"Hanging Tree," 1990, Mixed media.

"Earl Fatha Hines," 1990, Mixed media.

"Untitled," 1992

"The Summer of 1965," 1996

Close up showing photos of the Watts riots.

"Untitled," 1993, Mixed media

"Strange Fruit," 2002, Assemblage
Referring to both the Billie Holiday song abut the history of lynching in this country and to the history of tar-and-feather attacks on African Americans...works that confront our nation's history of social injustice and violence. (description by museum)

"Spaceman," 1993, Assemblage sculpture

"Untitled," 2000, Mixed Media

"No Contest (Bicycles)," 1991, Assemblage sculpture

"From the Point of View of the Little People," 1994, Mixed-media construction.

"Law and Order," 1965, Plexiglas assemblage.

"Untitled," 1967, Mixed media

"Ode to Frank Gehry," 2000, Assemblage sculpture.
"A large abstract form built out of discarded shipping containers...pays homage to the renowned ...architect and to Purifoy's own architectural aspirations."

"65 Aluminum Trays," 2002, Assemblage sculpture.