The Outdoor Desert Art Museum of Assemblage Sculpture is the sprawling artist-designed environment created by Noah Purifoy in Joshua Tree’s desert, now stewarded by the Noah Purifoy Foundation.
NPF’s mission is to preserve and maintain the site Noah Purifoy developed in Joshua Tree, California as a permanent cultural center and sculpture park open to the public; to promote public recognition and appreciation for the values that Noah Purifoy’s work as artist and educator has embodied; and to pursue these goals in a manner that protects Noah Purifoy’s contribution as an artist and educator.
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 40th birthday, Purifoy earned a BFA degree from Chouinard, now CalArts.
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.
The Noah Purifoy Desert Art Museum of Assemblage Art is open to the public every day of the year from sun up until sundown and is free of charge. Please sign in at the welcome kiosk near the mailboxes when you visit, and take one of our brochures for a self-guided tour.
Credit: Overview from museum website