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In the last 15 years of his life Noah Purifoy lived in the Mojave Desert where he created large-scale sculptures spread over ten acres. British photographer Hannah Collins (born 1956) made a series of exquisite black-and-white photographic studies of Purifoy's assemblages and sculptures.
Hannah Collins was born in London in 1956. From 1989 to 2010 she lived and worked in Barcelona, and today lives between London and Almeria, Spain. Collins has received many awards including a Fulbright Scholarship and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1993.
Her body of work includes photographs, films, written texts and books. She is known for her work in expanding the fields of photography and film. Her works are embedded in historical and social frameworks with a wide range of subjects and geographical locations. Her involvement in a body of work often continues over many years.
In 2015 a retrospective of her work was shown at the Sprengel Museum Hannover, in conjunction with the award of the Spectrum Prize. The exhibition traveled to Camden Art Centre London and Baltic Centre Newcastle. In addition to the Hannover retrospective publication, Collins’ last book was The Fragile Feast (2011). In 2019 her recent digital slide show created with musician Duncan Bellamy was shown at the Tapies Foundation Barcelona and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2020 Hannah Collins curated the exhibition We Will Walk - Art and Resistance in the American South at Turner Contemporary in Margate UK.
Noah Purifoy, born in Snow Hill, Alabama in 1917, 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 40th birthday, Purifoy earned a BFA degree from Chouinard, now CalArts.
His earliest body of sculpture, constructed out of charred debris from the 1965 Watts rebellion, was the basis for 66 Signs of Neon, the landmark 1966 group exhibition on the Watts riots that traveled throughout the country. As a founding director of the Watts Towers Art Center, Purifoy knew the community intimately. His 66 Signs of Neon, in line with the postwar period’s fascination with the street and its objects, constituted a Duchampian approach to the fire-molded alleys of Watts. This strategy profoundly impacted artists such as David Hammons, John Outterbridge and Senga Nengudi. For the 20 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 1980s, after 11 years of public policy work for the California Arts Council, where Purifoy initiated programs such as Artists in Social Institutions, which brought art into the state prison system, Purifoy moved his practice out to the Mojave desert. He lived for the last 15 years of his life creating ten acres full of large-scale sculpture on the desert floor. Constructed entirely from junked materials, this otherworldly environment is one of California’s great art historical wonders.
- Publisher: Steidl
Publish Date: February 03, 2026
Pages: 44
Language: English
Type: Hardback
EAN/UPC: 9783958292680
Dimensions: N/A
BISAC Categories: Arts & Hobbies, Arts & Hobbies, Arts & Hobbies
