Dear Artist,
If you drive for about a hundred miles due east out of Los Angeles, you’ll reach the Mojave Desert and the edge of one of its National Parks, Joshua Tree. There, among a dusty network of roads to nowhere, a ten-acre plot sprouts with assemblages made from the detritus of 20th Century America. Repurposed and redesigned to tell new stories, they cut, wind-worn and bleached, into a cerulean, high desert sky.
No Contest (Bicycles), 1991
by Noah Purifoy (1917-2004)
Noah Purifoy was born in 1917 in Snow Hill, Alabama, where he, his twelve brothers and sisters and his parents, picked cotton. After serving as a Naval seabee in the Pacific front during World War II, Noah used his GI Bill benefits to get a master’s degree in social work from the University of Atlanta. He worked for awhile helping people with mental health problems adjust to independent living, then applied to art school. In 1952, Noah became the first African American to be accepted into the Chouinard Art Institute (now called CalArts). As part of the great migration, he left the South and settled in Los Angeles, earning his B.F.A in time for his 40th birthday.
Ode To Frank Gehry, 1999
by Noah Purifoy
As his abstractions began to get noticed within L.A.’s insular downtown creative scene, Noah longed to explore art’s function and potential power in wider society. In 1964, he founded Watts Towers Art Center in the community of Watts, south of downtown, where he mentored inner city kids and adults. In 1965, riots protesting police brutality erupted in the neighbourhood and burned much of the shopping area. Over five days, 34 people were killed and thousands arrested. Noah and his students salvaged the burned-out debris and cleaned, polished and mounted the rubble into assemblages. Noah’s exhibition at the Watts Towers Cultural Center cemented a devotion to the found object as a chronicle of social change.
In 1976, dreaming of art’s potential to change lives, Noah became a founding member of the California Arts Council, piloting artist-in-the-community outreach programs, including in prisons, schools, hospitals and seniors’ centers. Noah stopped making art for eleven years. In 1989, retired from the council and struggling to afford his studio space in an artists’ co-op downtown, Noah accepted an invitation to share a desolate plot of land one hundred miles inland with an artist friend. In this remote area, he set up a trailer in which to live and began to assemble again, pulling from the rubble of his new community.
65 Aluminum Trays, 2002
by Noah Purifoy
Sincerely,
Sara
PS: “Junk art, assemblage art… it’s as close to human existence because it’s all the castoffs we are utilizing here. I won’t say that assemblage art is much like life itself, but it’s closer to existence than any other art form. Because it’s your shit that we’re remodeling… and you got rid of it.” (Noah Purifoy)
Esoterica: In March 2004, Noah died after a cigarette caught fire in his trailer while he was sleeping. He was 86. Earlier, at the prompting of his long-time assistant and with the help of an historian friend, Noah had set up a foundation that could one day take over the sculpture park that was spreading across his property. “I hope my work provides inspiration for a person to do today what they couldn’t do yesterday, no matter what it is,” said Noah. “That’s art.”
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The illustrated monograph Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada by curators Franklin Sirmans and Yael Lipschutz, published to accompany Noah’s 2015 posthumous survey at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is here.
“I do not wish to be an artist. I only wish that art enables me to be.” (Noah Purifoy, 1963)
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The Wine Drinkardoil on canvas
1962
40 x 50 inches
Featured Artist
There’s a hush… a palpable electric presence radiating from some of the paintings in New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and in the galleries of the Frick Collection.
13 Comments
Thanks for the story of Noah and his conotribution to the art world and social history.
I appreciate the stories that accompany art and their maker. Thank you Sara!
No matter what language one listens with, the experience of art transcends, opens the portal of the senses, nourishes and brings me back to a better self!
Thank you Sara, I followed your father and I’m glad that you have continued his work. I am a black artist from the midwest and I had never heard of Mr. Purifoy. I hope to see more of it.
Thank you for this uplifting story. Made me think. God bless dear Noah.
Noah’s memorable quote “I do not wish to be an artist. I only wish that art enables me to be….speaks volumes to me. This goes in my studio! Thank you, Sara, for bringing Noah into my consciousness.
Thank you Sara for the uplifting story of Noah’s life and accomplishments. I hadn’t heard of him before and found your account of him quite fascinating.
Thanks for the reminder of how art transcends many an obstacle! What an inspiration!
“Art’s long…Life’s short” is exemplified by the wonderful work you do Sara.
“Art is cheap, Architecture is expensive.”
The Purefoy piece is timely for me as I am currently riveted by Mary Schmidt Campbell’s “ An American Odyssey”, published last year and detailing the life of Romare Beardon. Beardon is renowned for his coming of age in the Harlem Renaissance , his push to be part of the mainstream art world while bearing witness to the African American experience, and for his prowess in collage, where he was regarded by many as a peer of Picasso and Braques. Purefoy and Beardon had many many things in common, especially as social workers and dedicated community activists. I have been more and more aware of Beardon’s work and influence as years have passed, because he is claimed with pride as a native son in my hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina. It is exciting to widen my awareness of the fascinating web which is the experience of African Amricans who make art.
I am embarrassed to have misspelled Romare Bearden’s name in my comment above. A sheepish self-correction.
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