Noah Purifoy's Desert of Found Things
Near Joshua Tree, California
Out on the open flats near Joshua Tree stands a haunting field of sculpture built entirely from junk, and it is the life's work of an artist named Noah Purifoy. Born in Alabama in nineteen seventeen, Purifoy served as a Navy Seabee in World War Two and became the first African American to enroll full time at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. He helped found the Watts Towers Arts Center.
After the Watts uprising of nineteen sixty-five, he gathered the charred wreckage left in the streets and turned it into a landmark exhibition of assemblage art called Sixty-Six Signs of Neon, transforming the debris of a riot into a statement about race and America. In nineteen eighty-nine, Purifoy moved out to the high desert near Joshua Tree and spent the last fifteen years of his life building enormous sculptures from found objects across roughly ten acres of sand. Toilets, bicycles, bowling balls, and old television sets became towers and tunnels and strange leaning structures.
He died in two thousand four, but his Outdoor Desert Art Museum still stands, free and open, a whole landscape assembled from what everyone else threw away.
