One Man's Trash

In the high desert around Joshua Tree, along a dirt road that cuts through the hardscrabble landscape like an arrow, is a museum of otherworldly beauty—a miniature 10-acre city constructed of toilets, used tires, antiquated computers, old stoves, scrap metal, and other bits of salvaged junk. During the last 15 years of his life, until his death in 2004 at the age of 86, Noah Purifoy lived in a trailer on the site and created these installations and sculptures. Purifoy was no eccentric recluse but rather, in the words of Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight, “the least well-known pivotal American artist of the last 50 years.” Knight was reviewing “Junk Dada,” a 2015 retrospective of Purifoy’s work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). The show contributed to the artist’s rediscovery, and since then visitors have fl ocked to the desert to see the coda to his career—the Noah Purifoy Desert Art Museum of Assemblage Sculpture.

I’ve come. “We have to stay here until dusk!” he implores.