ART STOP
NOAH PURIFOY and his Outdoor Desert Art Museum
A key figure in assemblage art, Southern Californian art history and the chronicling of the AfricanAmerican experience, Noah Purifoy was born in 1917 in Snow Hill, Alabama, where his family lived in the atmosphere of the Jim Crow South.
Graduating with a degree in teaching, he served in the Navy during the Second World War as a carpenter’s mate and went on to earn a graduate degree in social services administration. These elements are useful in understanding the trajectory of Purifoy’s art practice as it emerged in the 1950s and ‘60s. Purifoy lived briefly in Cleveland, Ohio, after receiving his graduate degree, but then moved even further from the South, to Los Angeles, in 1950. Three years later he became the first African American to enroll in Chouinard Art Institute, the predecessor of the California Institute of the Arts, and graduated with a BFA in 1956. His pedagogical
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A R T PAT R O N M A G A Z I N E . C O M
