Noah Purifoy Outdoor Desert Art Museum

Sculpture built out of what other people threw away

Noah Purifoy spent the last stretch of his life on open desert land north of Joshua Tree village, assembling large sculptures out of salvage. Plywood, bicycle parts, plumbing fixtures, tract-house doors, vacuum cleaners, whatever came to hand. He had helped found the Watts Towers Arts Center and made work from the debris of the Watts uprising before he moved out here, and the desert pieces are the largest body of that practice. They are still standing on the ground where he built them.

The site is outdoors, unfenced and free. There is no ticket window and no docent. You park on a dirt shoulder and walk in among the assemblages while the wind moves through them, and the sun and dust keep working on the material the way he expected them to.

It explains the art reputation of this stretch of the high desert more directly than any gallery on Highway 62 does. A good deal of what came afterward grew around this.

The road in is dirt, and there is no shade at all

A few things separate a good visit from a bad one. Come in the morning or the late afternoon. There is no shade anywhere on the site, and standing in an open lot at midday is not a way to look at art. Wear closed shoes, because the ground is sand, nails and broken glass in places, and the work is not a curated path.

Go slowly. The pieces reward walking around them rather than past them, and the whole site takes an hour if you let it. Bring water even though it feels like a short stop, because it is a short stop only if you rush it.

The access is the part people get wrong. The last stretch in is unpaved and washboarded, fine for an ordinary car driven carefully and unpleasant if you take it at speed. After rain it can be considerably worse, and the surface changes through the year. Ask your local manager how the road is running before you set out if the weather has been doing anything.

The site runs on donations and volunteer upkeep. Leave something in the box, carry your trash out, and do not climb on the work. It is holding up under weather it was designed for, not under people.