Noah Purifoy: through the fire

This dissertation examines and contextualizes the work of Noah Purifoy. Born in Snow Hill, Alabama in 1917, Noah Purifoy lived and worked most of his life in Los Angeles and Joshua Tree, California, where he died in 2004. He received an undergraduate degree from Alabama State Teachers College in 1943 and a graduate degree from Atlanta University in 1948. In 1956, just shy of his fortieth birthday, Purifoy received a BFA from Chouinard, now known as CalArts. 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 (1966), a landmark group exhibition on the riots, which traveled throughout the country. In line with the postwar period's general fascination with the street and its objects, Purifoy's 66 Signs of Neon constituted a Duchampian approach to the fire-molded alleys of Watts, a strategy that profoundly impacted artists then emerging in Los Angeles and beyond, such as David Hammons, John Outterbridge, and Senga Nengudi, who all worked with him. For the twenty years that followed the rebellion, Purifoy dedicated himself to the found object, and to using art as a tool for social change. ❧ In the late 1980's, Purifoy moved his practice out to the Mojave desert, where he lived for the last fifteen years of his life, creating ten-acres full of large-scale sculpture on the desert floor. Constructed entirely from junked materials, this otherworldly environment displays an artistic scope so diverse as to represent a veritable template for much of the art world's sculptural production of the last two decades. Noah Purifoy: Through the Fire explores a pivotal, though under-recognized, figure in the development of postwar American art whose effect is only beginning to be fully understood, investigating every aspect of his career, from his early experiences as a designer in Los Angeles's flourishing midcentury design movement to his public policy work for the California Arts Council, through to his tenure in the Mojave desert.