Beyond
29
Elsewhere
Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada June 7–September 27, 2015 Los Angeles County Museum of Art Los Angeles, California lacma.org
Rising Up: Hale Woodruff’s Murals at Talladega College June 13–September 6, 2015 Birmingham Museum of Art Birmingham, Alabama artsbma.org
I am thrilled that our colleagues at LACMA will host the first monographic exhibition dedicated to the late Noah Purifoy, a seminal American artist whose work was recently on view at the Studio Museum in When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South (2014). Co-curated by Franklin Sirmans, Terri and Michael Smooke Department Head and Curator of Contemporary Art, and independent curator Yael Lipschutz, Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada examines the distinct stylistic periods of Purifoy’s career, beginning with nearly a dozen works from his landmark 1966 exhibition 66 Signs of Neon, and continuing through his lifetime. Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada is accompanied by a major catalogue with essays by Yael Lipschutz, Lowery Stokes Sims and Kristine McKenna, with a preface by Franklin Sirmans.
Organized by our friends at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, in collaboration with Talladega College in Alabama, Rising Up: Hale Woodruff's Murals at Talladega College features six large-scale murals depicting landmark events in the rise of blacks from slavery to freedom. The vibrant murals, commissioned in 1938, commemorate the 1867 founding of Talladega College, one of the nation’s pioneering all-black colleges. Additionally, Rising Up explores Woodruff’s impact on the arts and includes twenty-four supplemental works, including research, paintings and linocut prints.
Noah Purifoy No Contest (bicycles), 1991 Noah Purifoy Foundation
Hale Woodruff The Mutiny on the Amistad, 1939 Collection of Talladega College, Talladega, Alabama