b. 1917 d. 2004
Site Affiliation: Noah Purifoy Outdoor Desert Museum of Assemblage Sculpture
Noah Purifoy was born in Snow Hill, Alabama in 1917 and died in Joshua Tree, California in 2004. He received three undergraduate degrees, the last, at just shy of 40 years old, from Chouinard, now CalArts. He was founding director of the Watts Towers Art Center and in response to the Watts uprising in 1965, created the exhibition 66 Signs of Neon with a diverse group of fellow artists using detritus collected on the streets of South Los Angeles. Appointed to the California Arts Council in 1976 he committed himself to using art as a tool for social change bringing arts programs to California prisons. In 1989 Noah moved to Joshua Tree and lived the last 15 years of his life creating 10 acres of sculpture on the desert floor constructed from junked/found objects. In 2015, LACMA celebrated his achievements with an acclaimed retrospective, Noah Purifoy Junk Dada.
Primary Medium: Mixed media, Found objects
Primary Stylistic Term: Assemblage
Fun Fact: Noah volunteered to serve in the Navy in 1942 and worked in the Construction Battalion (Seabees) building airfields and quonset huts for the Marines.
Recommended Publications: Noah Purifoy High Desert (Steidl 2014); Noah Purifoy Junk Dada by Franklin Sirmans and Yael Lipschutz (2015)