Noah Purifoy (1917–2004)
63030 Blair Lane, Joshua Tree, CA 92252
ABOUT
Noah Purifoy‘s Outdoor Museum is open every day from dawn to dusk. The Foundation does not ask for reservations or an entrance fee, which enables the general public to visit as long and as often as they wish. The Museum is not fenced in (according to Noah’s wishes), allowing the 100+ sculptures to sit amid and interact with the environment and adjacent landscape on the desert floor. In the midst of the sculpture site his trailer, where he lived for a number of years, and his workshop still stand. The Museum site is, in essence, Noah’s studio which afforded him the space to execute his vision of a large art piece, which includes large scale “environmental sculptures” or “constructions” that Noah defined as “something big enough to walk through”.
SPECIAL RESOURCES
“Here in the desert, the rabbits, the birds, the scorpions, the lizards all run quiet. You can see them for long distances, but you can’t hear them. The birds squawk, the quails squeak, the buzzards buzz, or whatever they do – honk – and it’s a haven for wildlife. I have learned to live here, and it’s rather pleasant.”
— Noah Purifoy
Noah Purifoy (1917–2004)
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.
LEARN MORE
“I make art. I don’t do maintenance.” – Noah Purifoy
“We made a foundation. Now we do maintenance.” – Sue A. Welsh, NPF Co-Founder and Emeritus Trustee
Artist, theorist, and community artist, Noah Purifoy was an anomaly in the art world. Coming to art-making later in life with a passion and vision whose contributions and sizable cultural imprint are finally receiving the attention they deserve in an art world long in the tooth but short in diversity.
Noah’s life story is just as rugged as the Mojave Desert territory he eventually changed with his art. Born in 1917 at the height of Jim Crow in Snow Hill, Alabama, a town that has no national census data, he sought out higher education, received a B.A. degree, taught industrial arts in high school, and then enlisted in the Navy during WWII as a Sea Bee. After the war, he returned to university for a graduate degree in Social Work, eventually moving to Los Angeles. Noah’s curiosity and determination are worthy, in and of itself, of multiple volumes. As a co-founder of the Watts Towers Art Center (with Judson Powell) and a founding member of California Arts Council (CAC), he initiated ideas we now call “social practice,” authoring arts-education programs in Watts, and Artist in Prisons, Schools, and Communities for the CAC. However, his ideas about “the creative process,” the intellectual glue that held all of his activities together, still need full annotating.
It’s not difficult to understand the depth and breadth of these two quotes when standing on Blair Lane in Joshua Tree, California, looking out over the scores of artworks—from monumental to human scale, built by Purifoy over sixteen years, that populate the ten-acre site of the Noah Purifoy Outdoor Desert Art Museum of Assemblage Sculpture. Also, the immense challenges facing the Foundation as well. Sometimes, you can feel Noah’s presence working in seamless collaboration with the robust environment of the High Desert —his oft-cited partner in the creative process. Noah was seventy-two years old when he moved to the desert NPF’s goals are to preserve and maintain Purifoy’s existing works of art and make the ten- acre Noah Purifoy Desert Art Museum of Assemblage Sculpture available for public engagement and educational programs. The Foundation provides visitors with a coherent explanation of the museum project and its ongoing development. NPF also organized its archives to support research opportunities for national and international curators and scholars.
