Noah Purifoy - Outdoor Desert Art Museum of Assemblage Sculpture

 

 "The Noah Purifoy Outdoor Desert Art Museum of Assemblage Sculpture sits on ten-acres in the Mojave Desert foothills near the Mojave National Preserve, an austere expanse of scrubby desert and jagged mountains established in 1994 as part of the California Desert Protection Act. The site holds the home, studio, and sculpture park of renowned assemblage artist Noah Purifoy (1917-2004) who lived there from 1989 until his death.
Purifoy first gained acclaim for his participation in the 1966 traveling group exhibition 66 Signs of Neon, which he organized with fellow artist Judson Powell. The groundbreaking show with work by eight artists was organized in response to the August 1965 racial riots in Los Angeles’ Watts neighborhood. Purifoy, a cofounder and first director of the city’s Watts Towers Arts Center, had watched the riots from the Center’s doors and the work that he created for the show was constructed out of rubble that he salvaged in the aftermath. The experience had a profound influence on him, which he recounted in the exhibition catalogue: “Judson and I, while teaching at the Watts Towers Art Center, watched aghast the rioting, looting and burning during the August happening. And while the debris was still smoldering, we ventured into the rubble like other junkers of the community, digging and searching, but unlike others, obsessed without quite knowing why.” The event marked a turning point in Purifoy’s work and fundamentally shaped his career. He viewed art as a vehicle for transformation, stating that he simply wanted to be known as an artist who made art for the sake of change and who strove to understand art and its role in the world."(tclf.org)

 

Jason Rhoades - Monumental Installations Artistic

"Jason Rhoades (1965 – 2006) is known for monumental, room-filling installations. These idiosyncratic sculptures incorporate a wide range of objects including products of mass culture combined with hand-made items and biographical references. Drawing on the history of assemblage, Rhoades imbues his materials with powerful formal, narrative and allegorical links, encouraging viewers to connect and interpret the associative chains. Rhoades often drew inspiration from the city of Los Angeles where he lived and worked as well as The Great American West, informed by his rural upbringing in Northern California. His work has been exhibited internationally since the early 1990s.Engaged with concepts such as labor, capital, materiality, modernism, performance and process, Rhoades’s work often derives from the specific conditions in which the work is created and explores structures that are not readily visible or apparent. His practice, emblazoned by the artist’s bold sense of freedom, wryly subverts the expectation of artists and artworks by breaking with aesthetic conventions and pushing against the boundaries of the art world. Rhoades fundamentally understood art to be “a pursuit of something” and notably viewed his body of work as one piece, a singular ongoing project."(hauserwirth.com)

Installation art Edward Kienholz

Edward Kienholz (October 23, 1927 – June 10, 1994) was an American installation artist and assemblage sculptor whose work was highly critical of aspects of modern life. From 1972 onwards, he assembled much of his artwork in close collaboration with his artistic partner and fifth wife,Nancy Reddin Kienholz. Throughout much of their career, the work of the Kienholzes was more appreciated in Europe than in their native United States, though American museums have featured their art more prominently since the 1990s.

 Art critic Brian Sewell called Edward Kienholz "the least known, most neglected and forgotten American artist of Jack Kerouac's Beat Generation of the 1950s, a contemporary of the writers Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Norman Mailer, his visual imagery at least as grim, gritty, sordid and depressing as their literary vocabulary

 An American artist of unwavering originality, critical insight, and notoriety, Edward Kienholz created powerful work that reflected upon contemporary social and political issues of late twentieth-century America. He created life-size three-dimensional tableaux and immersive environments, composed out of the discarded detritus he found at yard sales and flea markets. Although he is best known for his contributions to the development of postwar sculptural practices, Kienholz was also a key promoter of the Los Angeles avant-garde as the founder of the NOW Gallery and cofounder of the Ferus Gallery, a pivotal venue and gathering place for the era's emerging poets and artists. From 1972 onward, he worked almost exclusively with his fifth wife, the artist Nancy Reddin Kienholz, who played a significant role in the conceptualization and fabrication of his later works.(theartstory.org)

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