I’ve written about the desert plenty of times. I’m thoroughly fascinated by it. Not just that I think it’s cool, but that I have a metaphysical connection with it, which is often completely ludicrous because the desert is horrible.
Two years back I took The Nugget out for an overnight. My plan bonked big time and we ended up running around in an outdoor art museum for 30 minutes and driving the 3 hours back to SD. You can read about that here.
I couldn’t resist that place, though. So we went back. Along with my fascination with the desert is my fascination with what the desert can do to things…or people for that matter. And the Noah Purifoy Outdoor Desert Art Museum is just that. A 10 acre plot filled with stuff from the dump. Broken toilets, broken electronics, broken glass (pretty much broken everything) assembled as sculptures and displaying the inner workings of a black man born in 1917 in Snow Hill, Alabama. He lived the last 15 years of his life in a friends trailer in the Mohave desert assembling these large scale works of art from found objects. It is not for the masses. It is wreckage formed into something resembling beauty and intrigue and laid out in the harshness of nature to see just what power nature has to act on it.
And that’s totally the point. And it resonates so deeply within me.
