The Most Influential Museum Shows of 2015

This year’s most talked-about and game-changing institutional shows have revisited overlooked artists, cemented the positions of two of 20th-century art’s profoundest painters, and brought overdue attention to one of Latin America’s most important artists. They have also catapulted two emerging artists to the mainstream, harnessed the power of technology, and asked: What is American art today?

Artsy Editorial

Dec 16th, 2015 4:00 am

“Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada” at LACMA

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  Noah Purifoy

  No Contest (bicycles), 1991

  "Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada" at LACMA, Los Angeles (2015)

Noah Purifoy’s idiosyncratic assemblages and sculptures don’t exactly lend themselves to a museum setting. Purifoy, the late L.A. artist-activist who co-founded the Watts Towers Art Center (and made art from the wreckage of the 1960s Watts riots), uprooted from the city and moved to the desert in 1989. There, he spent some 15 years creating large-scale works—dense facades embedded with scrap furniture parts, a roller-coaster form made of aluminum trays, makeshift dwellings, a scramble of metal chair legs reaching into the sky. The Noah Purifoy Outdoor Museum, the home of this prolific, imaginative output, is now a pilgrimage site for tourists, art lovers, and desert rats alike.
In a show curated by Franklin Sirmans and Yael Lipschutz, LACMA gave Purifoy his second-ever survey (the first was in 1997 at the California African American Museum), and first high-profile retrospective this year, a crucial recontextualization that provided a window into the life and work of this important and overlooked outsider figure who did much to shape black consciousness on the West Coast.

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https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-this-year-s-most-influential-museum-shows