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Lot Essay
Of significant historical importance, Noah Purifoy’s Totem (circa 1966) was executed one year following the 1965 Watts Rebellion, a series of riots that broke out over the span of six days in Watts, California, ignited by an incident of police discrimination. With a community in ruins, Purifoy was inspired to reinvigorate his artistic practice by sourcing his working materials from the destruction. It was in this practice of engaging these socially-charged, and seemingly ‘unusable’, objects that Purifoy radicalized the conditions of materialism in sculpture, inspiring creativity without overconsumption. It was the artist’s belief that the true function of a work, such as Totem, was to interrogate the ways that individuals understand their relationships to each other, to materials and to their communities: “The ultimate purpose of this effort, as we conceived it then, was to demonstrate to the community of Watts, to Los Angeles, and to the world at large, that education through creativity is the only way left for a person to find himself in this materialistic world … Art of itself is of little or no value if in its relatedness it does not effect change” (N. Purifoy, quoted in “The Art of Communication as a Creative Act,” in 66 Signs of Neon, exh. cat., 1966).
One of a series of abstract assemblages done by the artist in the wake of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, and the first to be offered at auction since the Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power exhibition, Totem was debuted at the artist’s landmark exhibition, 66 Signs of Neon, which first showed at the Watts Summer Festival in the Markham Junior High Gymnasium in 1966. More recently, Totem was included in the seminal exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, which exhibited first at the Tate Gallery in London in 2017, and travelled the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, The Brooklyn Museum, New York and The Broad, Los Angeles. A work of compelling history, and a profound relic of the genesis of the artist’s creative inspiration, Noah Purifoy’s Totem is a commanding treasure.
One of a series of abstract assemblages done by the artist in the wake of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, and the first to be offered at auction since the Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power exhibition, Totem was debuted at the artist’s landmark exhibition, 66 Signs of Neon, which first showed at the Watts Summer Festival in the Markham Junior High Gymnasium in 1966. More recently, Totem was included in the seminal exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, which exhibited first at the Tate Gallery in London in 2017, and travelled the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, The Brooklyn Museum, New York and The Broad, Los Angeles. A work of compelling history, and a profound relic of the genesis of the artist’s creative inspiration, Noah Purifoy’s Totem is a commanding treasure.