ART : The Desert Pack Rat : At 78, Noah Purifoy is finally able to devote himself full time to his art: building massive assemblages made from discarded materials in the Mojave Desert.

It isn’t 9 a.m. yet, but it’s already 98 degrees in this desert community, where Noah Purifoy settled in 1989. The 78-year-old native of Snow Hill, Ala., who has devoted the bulk of his life to social work, settled here on land owned by his longtime friend, artist Debbie Brewer, figuring that was the only way to get his overhead low enough to allow him to make a full-time commitment to art.

Purifoy earned a bachelor of fine arts at the Chouinard Art Institute in 1956 but could never quite figure out how to make a living in the arts, so he spent the next 20 years at a series of art-related jobs--interior designer, window dresser, art educator. In 1976, he was appointed to the California Arts Council, a gig that was to occupy him for the next 11 years, but when he left the council in 1987, he knew the time had come to face the muse he’d been flirting with all his life. So he moved to the desert and got to work.

The fruits of that decision are visible everywhere you look on the 2 1/2 acres of parched land he occupies here. An inveterate pack rat who spends much of his time scavenging recyclable materials, Purifoy uses everything from bowling balls and old clothes to used appliances, coins and discarded food containers to create towering assemblages.

Known as an influence on the acclaimed artist David Hammond, Purifoy’s work is rarely seen locally. It is currently on view in a group show at the California Afro-American Museum and at Tara’s Hall, a house in the Wilshire District that’s been transformed into an art gallery by Purifoy’s friends, Sue and Tara Welch. However, to have the full Purifoy experience, one must visit him in Joshua Tree, where about 100 massive assemblages pepper the land surrounding the mobile home in which he lives.

Purifoy made this formidable body of work without the aid of an assistant. He hasn’t a tooth in his head, but otherwise he’s in incredibly good shape--as one must be in order to survive out here. During the blazing summer months, he spends much of the day in a jerry-built studio equipped with a swamp cooler, venturing outdoors at dusk or dawn, when it is not unusual for him to spend several hours struggling to get a large component of an even larger piece into place.

Why has he developed such a physically arduous method of art-making? “I’ve never been satisfied with little things that hang on the wall,” he replies.

The road that’s taken Purifoy from rural Alabama to the Mojave Desert is a strange one. Today, he says it’s clear that it was his destiny to be an artist, but it took him a long time to come to grips with that fate. Purifoy, the 10th of 13 children, says that his parents were farmers who moved to Birmingham when he was 3, then finally settled in Cleveland when he was 12.

“As a child I wasn’t conscious of racism,” he recalls, “but I was aware something was going on. Once, when I was 5, my mother was taking me to the store and there was a parade in the street. People had hoods on, and when I asked my mother what was happening she said, ‘That’s the Ku Klux Klan.’

“I had good parents who tried to protect me from the trauma they knew I’d encounter soon enough, and they encouraged me to go to school,” he continues. “So in 1939 I earned a teaching credential--not because I wanted to be a teacher, but because that was the only thing accessible to me then. I majored in history and social studies but never taught either--I ended up teaching shop at a school in Montgomery, Ala.”

Purifoy’s teaching career was interrupted in 1942 when he enlisted in the Army and was stationed in the South Pacific for three years. After returning from the war, he earned a master’s degree in social work, then landed a job at the Cuyahoga County Department of Social Services in Cleveland, where he worked from 1950 to 1952. While in the Army, Purifoy had passed through Los Angeles and had a hankering to return, so in 1952 he moved to L.A. and supported himself for the next two years doing social work at a county hospital.

“All my friends were social workers then, and they were horrible people,” he recalls with a laugh. “They thought they owned the Earth because they doled out a few dollars to poor people, so one day I just up and quit. Later that same day I was driving and I happened to pass Chouinard, and I dropped in and told them I wanted to enroll. This wasn’t something I’d been thinking about--I went in totally on a whim, but they admitted me because I was colored.

“I was the worst student in the whole school. I refused to draw, because I felt I had something and that if I learned to draw I’d be dead, because I’d end up making oil paintings, which wasn’t what I was after. I wanted to find my own way in art.”

Leaving Chouinard with a degree in 1956, Purifoy spent eight years working in various capacities as an interior designer.

“I wasn’t making art then, but I was posing as an artist. I wore a beret and spent lots of time drinking wine, eating cheese, listening to music and talking to people. We were concerned about civil rights and had a dialogue going about change.”

In 1964, Purifoy’s interest in civil rights led him to collaborate with musician Judson Powell and educator Sue Welch in the creation of the Watts Towers Arts Center, a community outreach program in South-Central L.A.; the next year he found himself in the eye of the hurricane of America’s racial conflict when the Watts riots erupted.

“I was in the middle of it, but I wasn’t afraid,” he recalls. “I thought it was great because it was overdue, and it turned out to be a gold mine for me. I collected three tons of debris from the riot and began making art out of it. I was searching for my own idea and had been studying the Dada movement and how it had reversed the whole concept of art, and the debris from the riot is what finally launched me on my own course. From 1965 to ‘69, I made lots of work, and I sold it as fast as I could make it.

“I was also reading philosophy then, and was knocked out by [Martin] Heidegger and [Edmund] Husserl. I was looking for methods of problem solving because I had lots of problems, and I was able to alter my behavior as a result of those two philosophers. They were great thinkers who went into areas where most people dare not go.”

The most noteworthy result of this period of Purifoy’s life was “66 Signs of Neon,” a massive group show of art fashioned out of the debris of the Watts riots, which traveled to galleries at nine U.S. universities from 1966-’69.

In 1970, just as Purifoy was getting his engine revved, he turned his back on art altogether.

“I dropped out for 20 years because I was disappointed in art,” he says. “I perceived art as a tool for change, and when I started the program in Watts I saw art as a potential savior. But the dropout population there increased rather than decreased, and the art I was making started to become formulaic and too easy. I was never interested in earning a lot of money--I wanted art to be a means of finding answers to questions like ‘What is growth?’ ‘What is change?’ Life isn’t worth living unless the individual is pushing to understand more, and art stopped being useful to me in that pursuit.”

Having been estranged from art for 20 years, Purifoy greeted it as a stranger upon settling in Joshua Tree, but at this point he is completely consumed by his work.

As to where he gets his materials, he explains: “A lot of the stuff I buy from a recycling place near here and it’s a horrendous cost--I spend lots of money on materials. Last year a local paper ran a story about me, so I also get lots of calls from people who say, ‘I’m cleaning out my garage, why don’t you bring a truck over and take what you want?’

“There’s no ecological message behind my use of recycled materials. I use them because that’s what’s available to me.

“People occasionally comment on how hard it must be living out in this desert by myself, but this is a breeze compared to many things I’ve been through. The most difficult period of my life was when I was a young adult. I was raised in the church, and as a teen-ager I found myself in conflict about sex and religion. I gave up religion--and leaving the church didn’t hurt at all,” he says with a laugh.

“Sometimes I wish I had a savior because I don’t know what happens after death, but I do know I don’t believe in heaven. I recently made a series of works called ‘Desert Tombstones,’ and while I was working on them I thought a lot about death. It’s been said that if you don’t accept death as an equal part of existence, you’re in for trouble somewhere down the line. I’d never given much thought to any of this, because I thought I’d live forever, but I realize that’s not the case. That may have something to do with why I’m pushing myself so hard now to finally get the work out that’s always been in me.”

* Purifoy’s work is part of “Environments: Extending the Artist’s Realm,” on view through December at the California Afro-American Museum, Exposition Park, 600 State Drive, (213) 744-7432. For more information on Purifoy or to arrange a visit to his Joshua Tree environment, call (619) 366-1989. To visit Tara’s Hall, call (213) 382-7516.