HDI Exhibition Pick: “Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada” at LACMA

Another fantastic exhibit currently at LACMA that shouldn’t be missed if you find yourself in Los Angeles is “Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada”. Noah Purifoy (1917–2004) was an African American visual artist and sculptor and he lived and worked most of his life in Los Angeles and Joshua Tree, California. A founding director of the Watts Towers Art Center, his earliest body of sculpture, constructed out of charred debris from the 1965 Watts Rebellion, was the basis for 66 Signs of Neon, a landmark group exhibition about the riots that traveled to nine venues between 1966 and 1969.

In the late 1980’s, after eleven years of public policy work for the California Arts Council, where Purifoy initiated programs such as Artists in Social Institutions, bringing art into the state prison system, Purifoy moved his practice to the Mojave desert. He lived there for the last fifteen years of his life, creating ten acres of large-scale sculpture constructed entirely from junked materials.

The exhibition explores a pivotal yet under-recognized figure in the development of postwar American Art whose effect is only beginning to be fully understood.

I do not wish to be an artist. I only wish that art enables me to be.

-Noah Purifoy, 1963

“Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada” has been extended until January 3rd, 2016. Don’t miss this gem at LACMA!