One Man’s Trash

Eric Wills | The American Scholar | 24th October 2022

An ode to Purifoy’s Desert Art Museum of Assemblage Sculpture, located east of Los Angeles. He was a social worker with a low-ish profile art career, who retired to the desert to make sculptures using salvaged materials. Dozens of works sit out in the open and “reveal themselves as if in some fever dream, their range and ambition astonishing.” A 2015 retrospective led one critic to describe Purifoy as “the least well-known pivotal American artist of the last 50 years.”