ROB PRUITT

Rob Pruitt’s Flea Market, a nomadic event that has taken place all over the world, featured, in this iteration, vintage experts, design collectors, and visual artists from Palm Springs, Joshua Tree and the High Desert, and the eastern Coachella Valley. Inspired by the region’s robust mix of vintage, modern, and handcrafted goods, this traditional-style flea market made desert tastemakers’ wares available for sale. Here, orphaned and discarded objects were momentarily elevated atop the pedestal of the Palm Springs Art Museum.

neville wakefield: You and your partner, Jonathan, moved to Palm Springs a few years ago. What drew you to this part of the world?

rob pruitt: I was an East-Coast person my entire life. As I was approaching fifty, I sort of woke up feeling like I needed some change, changes in basic things like the light and space and climate. I was interested in the extreme weather conditions of Palm Springs. I really like it in the summer when it’s 110 and 120 degrees. It seems like another planet. I enjoy having my thought process altered. The extreme temperature is hallucinogenic. I like that aspect of it.

I landed in Palm Springs, and it was the middle of the mortgage crisis, 2009, and it seemed like every fourth house was for sale—the bank-owned or foreclosure type of sale—so we found this nice house from the 1930s next to a beautiful restored house that had been Busby Berkeley’s house. But the house that was for sale was ramshackle. It was beautiful, a Spanish Colonial revival with a center courtyard and a horseshoe shape. We had no intention of buying a house, but Jonathan suggested placing a lowball offer: “If they call us back accepting it, then that will be like winning the lottery, and we don’t have to think about it otherwise.” Two weeks later, we were back in New York and, sure enough, they did accept our offer, which was like less than half of what they had been asking, and we took it on as an adventure.

It’s interesting that your arrival in Palm Springs should be rooted in foreclosure, as the objects that you put in the flea market were also foreclosed objects. They tell us as much about what we don’t want as about what we do want.

It is about rediscovering abandoned things and looking at them in a new way, and, in the contemporary sense, recycling, too. This house, in the 1930s, was probably a weekend home for a glamorous film-industry person. Fashions changed, people moved on to other areas. Airline travel opened up countless other weekend and vacation possibilities. In the interim, the house and the neighborhood languished and, in a way, were just waiting to be rediscovered. I think, either you’re attracted to orphaned objects or you’re not, and I think that artists, for the most part, are. It is similar to the current influx of creative types moving to Joshua Tree now. Finding land or space that no one else has an interest in, or is affordable, and then making it yours. That’s the lure of the desert.

This is the idea of the secondhand versus the new, the secondhand being the narrative inscription of objects. The flea markets exposed the history and narrative of these abandoned objects.

It is cultural anthropology. When we moved out there, our budget allowed us to buy the house, and that was about it. Fixing and furnishing it, we relied on flea markets and vintage shops and, in doing so, met so many creative, talented people who owned and ran those vintage shops. A lot of them had come to the desert as part of a reinvention process of their own. I became friends with many, and their scope of knowledge—about contemporary art and furniture design and architecture and the region— was just so broad.

Is junk a key part of the desert aesthetic?

I think it’s a tradition of the desert. I remember a few years ago visiting my friend Jack Pierson in Twentynine Palms, walking around his property and admiring one part of a cactus garden filled with food cans and car parts that had rusted. He told me he was engaging in a tradition. People for years, decades, have been creating those “rust gardens” on their properties in the middle of nowhere, out in the desert.

Was it significant that you staged this flea market in the Palm Springs Art Museum, thereby placing the disaffected object on the pedestal of high art?

It was important to do it there for a couple of reasons. I love when high rubs up against low. I feel that there is truth in that mix. I was also awed by the creativity of the people I was buying from and getting to be friends with. They were some of the most gifted, talented people. So, I thought that it made sense to put their creative gestures within the walls of the museum, right next to the museum’s outstanding collection of desert landscape paintings.

The flea markets happened in the atrium right next to where the museum displays its collection of desert landscape paintings, like John Hilton and

James Swinnerton. I just thought, if I put these scavenged, beautifully curated objects up against these paintings of the desert, it’ll feel just right. I knew that they’d make incredible displays, towering junk gardens reflective of desert life.

I remember going to your first flea market at Gavin Brown’s in the late ’90s and being baffled by it. How did the flea markets evolve over almost two decades since then?

I wouldn’t deny that there must be a common thread, but each one is unique. Gavin had asked me to curate a summer group show, and so I retreated into my studio and thought long and hard about what type of group show I could do really well, having never curated one before. Being true to myself, I thought, it’s not going to be too heavy. I want to include my friends, I want to include the makers of things that I really love, and I want to give them complete freedom. I think that each one is a reflection of the community.

What were the highlights of the flea market that you created for Desert X?

I liked drawing portraits of people, like hosting my own little sidewalk portrait studio. It was nice to sit and converse with people that were paying their respects to me, wanting me to draw them. I dedicated myself to being there 100 percent of the time, so at the end of the two-week period we’d grown to be like a family. It was like a traveling caravan, only we didn’t travel to the next location.

I like to think that it brought people into the museum who ordinarily might not feel free to just walk on in and spend their lunch hour there—like a public park, open and embracing the community.