Despite the existence of a 10-acre sculpture park devoted to his work in Joshua Tree, CA, Noah Purifoy was largely unknown to the mainstream art world until the Getty's Pacific Standard Time exhibitions shed light on the artist, his career and his contributions. A single junk assemblage by Purifoy appeared in Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970, at the Getty proper and a half-dozen works were featured in Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980 at the Hammer. It is perhaps as a result of this newfound exposure that America Is Hard to See, the exhibition that opened the Whitney Museum's new building, presented a work by Purifoy in its "Scotch Tape" section devoted to assemblage and collage (see image below … [Read more...]
Mark Bradford: Scorched Earth at the Hammer Museum
In the way that Noah Purifoy's assemblage-based art had its source in the Watts Rebellion of 1965, Mark Bradford's artistic practice can be understood to have had its roots in the backlash after the Rodney King beatings in 1992, which Bradford experienced as a young man working in his mother's beauty shop in South L.A. For a gay, black youth, the police brutality and resulting race riots, which came at a time when he saw the AIDS epidemic running rampant around him, exerted an indelible formative influence. Since 2001, when Bradford emerged as a fully mature artist, his art has addressed injustice to African Americans, gays and women in an extension of the "Identity Politics" of the art of the late '80s and early '90s, but which … [Read more...]