Noah Purifoy Exhibit Showcases a Great Artist

BY STEVEN ROSEN / CINCINNATI CITYBEAT / MARCH 23, 2016

“Untitled” by Noah Purifoy, 1967

 

THE current 30 Americans show at the Cincinnati Art Museum offers a good chance to see work by key African-American contemporary artists.

All well and good, but you should also definitely get to the Wexner Center for the Arts in nearby Columbus by April 10 to see the retrospective show of another contemporary black artist, the late Noah Purifoy.

It’s called Junk Dada, and I believe you’ll leave it impressed — not just by the quality of his work and vision, but also by his importance to the art and American social and political thought of our times.

The Wexner is the only museum to present this exhibition besides the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which organized it. That speaks to how little-known the Alabama-born Purifoy is outside of Los Angeles, where he lived and worked for much of his career. (He lived and worked as a social worker in Cleveland before moving to L.A. in 1950; he died at age 87 in 2004.)

But it doesn’t speak to how powerful and influential an artist he was, creating assemblage, collage, sculpture and environmental installations in a way that acknowledged outsider art but was also the intentional conceptual work of a trained artist.

Further, his art was community-based while also being forcefully individualistic. He eventually moved to the remote California town of Joshua Tree, where he used his vision and knack for salvaging material to create a new arts-based community in the desert. His Joshua Tree Outdoor Museum now outlives him, as part of the nonprofit Noah Purifoy Foundation.

I’d compare him favorably with Robert Rauschenberg, David Smith, Thornton Dial and Donald Judd, and also to today’s artists who reclaim throwaway objects, like Mark Bradford (who is in 30 Americans) and the Ghana-born El Anatsui.

His journey as an artist cries out for a motion picture. After moving to L.A., he received a B.F.A. at the Chouinard Art Institute, which is now the California Institute of the Arts. He was almost 40 when he graduated. With his background in both art and social work, he came out of school with a keen interest in non-traditional, socially relevant object making.

Junk Dada brings together some 70 of his pieces, showing off his gift in such works as the 1958 surrealist woodwork “Untitled (Bed Headboard)”; 1989’s wearily splendorous assemblage “Rags and Old Iron I (After Nina Simone)”; and 1967’s wonderfully colorful, mixed-media “Untitled,” which uses the frame of an umbrella as a starting point.

The show has much information and photographs about the Outdoor Museum as well as one of his greatest projects — organizing the 1966 traveling exhibit 66 Signs of Neon.

At the time, he was director of L.A.’s Watts Towers Arts Center, drawing inspiration from that monumental creation of the visionary Simon Rodia while also working to connect this idiosyncratic work of outsider art to the black community surrounding it.

After the Watts rebellion/riots of 1965, Purifoy and other artists created 66 sculptures from the debris. The exhibit features a photograph of two women walking past a mountain of post-riots wreckage to show the challenge. Anyone who has ever dismissed the importance of “junk” as art-making material should sense the meaning that Purifoy instilled into it here. The project is a landmark, combining foreboding about the fire next time with hope for a better future.

I stumbled onto Purifoy’s 10-acre Joshua Tree Outdoor Museum accidentally when visiting the nearby national park in the early-2000s. He had moved there in 1989, starting a new chapter in his life in a vastly different environment from urban L.A.

He had a tract of relatively barren land that was filled with salvaged, reassembled material that served as a portal into an alternate version of the “real” landscape. He transformed it all into a village where the pieces of wood and metal, the salvaged toilets and bowling balls and who knows what else all fit together. There were other people there, walking and talking, treating the site like both a museum and an amusement park.

It took awhile to learn about his background and understand the intellectual underpinnings and decades of experience behind his work.

After Junk Dada, I believe he’s so important he should have his own museum. Fortunately, in Joshua Tree he does. Everyone should go. More information: wexarts.org.

Columbus exhibit honors Black Mountain College

Some of America’s greatest 20th-century artists either taught at or attended North Carolina’s progressive liberal arts school, which was open from 1933-1957.

BY STEVEN ROSEN /CINCINNATI CITYBEAT /NOV 16, 2016

Josef Albers’ “Leaf Study IX”PHOTO: TIM NIGHSWANDER / IMAGING 4 ART / COURTESY OF THE JOSEF AND ANNI ALBERS FOUNDATION / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY

In any list of great American universities, North Carolina’s Black Mountain College deserves a spot. It only lasted from 1933-1957, and wasn’t that well known nationally during its operation or for decades afterward.

But as realization has grown that some of America’s greatest 20th-century artists either taught at or attended the progressive liberal arts school, its fame has soared. And how could it not? Such key arts and humanities figures were associated with it as Josef and Anni Albers, Walter Gropius, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Buckminster Fuller, Ray Johnson, Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Ruth Asawa and others. You wouldn’t have a meaningful modern American culture, or the ideas that continue to inspire our avant-garde thinkers, without that list.

The first major museum exhibition about Black Mountain College, Leap Before You Look, is at the Wexner Center for the Arts on Ohio State University’s campus in Columbus now through Jan. 1, 2017. It’s an essential show for anyone who wants to understand how and why our arts are open to new ideas from the world around us.

It’s also a wisely curated mix of an art exhibit and a history one. As the latter, it includes photographs — archival ones as well as dramatically enlarged reproductions — that describe and depict how Black Mountain’s campus life was a kind of open-minded, tolerant communal experience, an American kibbutz. This exhibit was organized by Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art. For information on Columbus hours, visit wexarts.org.

Black Mountain College was started during the Great Depression by John Andrew Rice, a fired faculty member from Florida’s Rollins College. He found a Christian summer camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains, near Asheville, that could house his school. And he stressed an interdisciplinary approach to education. His brilliant stroke was to hire, as professors, Josef and Anni Albers, fleeing Germany after the Nazis shut down their Modernist school, the Bauhaus. (Black Mountain College later moved to a nearby site where students and faculty worked to design and construct the buildings.)

Josef headed the painting department until 1949 and encouraged students to think freely and experiment with recycled materials — out of practicality as much as innate avant-gardism, since the school’s budget was tight. And Anni established herself as a premier textile artist. (In 1949, Josef taught at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.)

This exhibit includes some of their wonderful work. Josef’s “Leaf Study IX,” which arranges autumnal brown leaves into a naturalistic pattern on yellow paper, has a keen sense of color and movement. His wife has what is, to me, the most beautiful work in this large show: her large cotton-and-linen textile piece, “With Verticals,” from 1946. It’s just exquisite; the narrowest of dark vertical rectangles are precisely placed on a red-and-white field of twisting lines. It can be read as purely abstract or as the façade of a mysterious building. Either way, it’s a visionary work.

You can see how an artist like Anni inspired others. It’s evident in the work of Ruth Asawa, an American-born woman of Japanese descent who came to Black Mountain in 1946 after her family’s internment during World War II. She later joined the faculty. In the show, she has a large copper-and-iron-wire sculpture, “Untitled,” suspended from the ceiling that has a lightness that creates the illusion of a weaving. Its contours weave in and out of the piece’s center like falling teardrops.

The great sculptor John Chamberlain arrived for a summer class in 1955, at the beginning of his career, and used welding tools to create what may have been his first piece using old auto parts., “Shortstop.”

As a summer-session faculty member in 1948, R. Buckminster Fuller solicited his students to help build and test his then-new geodesic dome. And in 1949, the next year, a photo by Hazel Larsen Archer shows him standing inside the open structure of an assembled dome. It’s like he’s inside a beach ball, beaming as a proud child would. It says so much about him and the thrill of learning at Black Mountain College.

CONTACT STEVEN ROSEN: srosenone@aol.com

Noah Purifoy Exhibit Showcases a Great Artist

I believe you’ll leave Junk Dada impressed — not just by the quality of the artist’s work and vision, but also by his importance to the art and American social and political thought of our times.

BY STEVEN ROSEN

MARCH 23, 2016 

CINCINNATI CITYBEAT

“Untitled” by Noah Purifoy, 1967

 

The current 30 Americans show at the Cincinnati Art Museum offers a good chance to see work by key African-American contemporary artists.

All well and good, but you should also definitely get to the Wexner Center for the Arts in nearby Columbus by April 10 to see the retrospective show of another contemporary black artist, the late Noah Purifoy.

It’s called Junk Dada, and I believe you’ll leave it impressed — not just by the quality of his work and vision, but also by his importance to the art and American social and political thought of our times.

The Wexner is the only museum to present this exhibition besides the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which organized it. That speaks to how little-known the Alabama-born Purifoy is outside of Los Angeles, where he lived and worked for much of his career. (He lived and worked as a social worker in Cleveland before moving to L.A. in 1950; he died at age 87 in 2004.)

But it doesn’t speak to how powerful and influential an artist he was, creating assemblage, collage, sculpture and environmental installations in a way that acknowledged outsider art but was also the intentional conceptual work of a trained artist.

Further, his art was community-based while also being forcefully individualistic. He eventually moved to the remote California town of Joshua Tree, where he used his vision and knack for salvaging material to create a new arts-based community in the desert. His Joshua Tree Outdoor Museum now outlives him, as part of the nonprofit Noah Purifoy Foundation.

I’d compare him favorably with Robert Rauschenberg, David Smith, Thornton Dial and Donald Judd, and also to today’s artists who reclaim throwaway objects, like Mark Bradford (who is in 30 Americans) and the Ghana-born El Anatsui.

His journey as an artist cries out for a motion picture. After moving to L.A., he received a B.F.A. at the Chouinard Art Institute, which is now the California Institute of the Arts. He was almost 40 when he graduated. With his background in both art and social work, he came out of school with a keen interest in non-traditional, socially relevant object making.

Junk Dada brings together some 70 of his pieces, showing off his gift in such works as the 1958 surrealist woodwork “Untitled (Bed Headboard)”; 1989’s wearily splendorous assemblage “Rags and Old Iron I (After Nina Simone)”; and 1967’s wonderfully colorful, mixed-media “Untitled,” which uses the frame of an umbrella as a starting point.

The show has much information and photographs about the Outdoor Museum as well as one of his greatest projects — organizing the 1966 traveling exhibit 66 Signs of Neon.

At the time, he was director of L.A.’s Watts Towers Arts Center, drawing inspiration from that monumental creation of the visionary Simon Rodia while also working to connect this idiosyncratic work of outsider art to the black community surrounding it.

After the Watts rebellion/riots of 1965, Purifoy and other artists created 66 sculptures from the debris. The exhibit features a photograph of two women walking past a mountain of post-riots wreckage to show the challenge. Anyone who has ever dismissed the importance of “junk” as art-making material should sense the meaning that Purifoy instilled into it here. The project is a landmark, combining foreboding about the fire next time with hope for a better future.

I stumbled onto Purifoy’s 10-acre Joshua Tree Outdoor Museum accidentally when visiting the nearby national park in the early-2000s. He had moved there in 1989, starting a new chapter in his life in a vastly different environment from urban L.A.

He had a tract of relatively barren land that was filled with salvaged, reassembled material that served as a portal into an alternate version of the “real” landscape. He transformed it all into a village where the pieces of wood and metal, the salvaged toilets and bowling balls and who knows what else all fit together. There were other people there, walking and talking, treating the site like both a museum and an amusement park.

It took awhile to learn about his background and understand the intellectual underpinnings and decades of experience behind his work.

After Junk Dada, I believe he’s so important he should have his own museum. Fortunately, in Joshua Tree he does. Everyone should go. More information: wexarts.org.

 

CONTACT STEVEN ROSEN: srosenone@aol.com