Noah Purifoy @ Tilton Gallery, NYC - "Poetry as Politics: Seeing Beyond the Object - Noah Purifoy and Kindred Spirits" Exhibition

Poetry as Politics: 

Seeing Beyond the Object 

Noah Purifoy and Kindred Spirits 

Tilton Gallery, New York 

March 20 - May 24, 2025 

Tilton Gallery presents an exhibition of works by NOAH PURIFOY (1917-2004) and a few of his contemporaries who were kindred spirits in their attitudes and philosophy towards art making. The exhibition centers on Purifoy’s signature assemblages and include works never before exhibited in New York. Works range from his important early 1965-66 Watts Remains from the rare group of works made for the exhibition 66 Signs of Neon in response to the 1965 Watts Rebellion to indoor and outdoor works from his period in Joshua Tree. 

Additional artists include John Outterbridge, David Hammons, Timothy Washington, John Riddle, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Varnette Honeywood, Betye Saar and Donald Stinson. Many of these works also have rarely, if ever, been shown.

Noah Purifoy and the artists in his circle in Los Angeles from the mid-sixties on, many of whom worked primarily in assemblage, believed in the power of art, the poetry of art to effect change and to propel thought that went beyond the art object to move attitudes in real life and political thinking. 

Noah Purifoy has stated: “When you do art, you see beyond the object. That effort of seeing beyond the object is also present in human relations.” He believed that art is a powerful tool for social change and that creativity and activism go hand in hand. John Outterbridge also spoke often about the wrongs of the world and the power of art to touch people and shape change. These artists turned philosophy into the poetry of art. 

Works were rarely overtly political, but the artists wove their understanding of history and of their present world, their beliefs and their hopes into constructions and sculptures and collages made from discarded fragments. Materials include found pieces of metal, carved wood, fabric and repurposed objects and partial objects of every kind. 

Never didactic, much was left up to the viewer, allowing the strength of the artworks to speak for itself. Direct activism was reserved for real life and channeled into impacting arts education and creating institutions and cultural centers for their community. 

Noah Purifoy was Founder and Director of the Watts Towers Arts Center from 1964 to 1975 where he created programs in the arts for the youth of the Watts community. He then sat on the California Arts Council for ten years from 1976 to 1987, promoting the arts and art education around the state. 

John Outterbridge (1933-2020) was Co-Founder and Artistic Director of the Compton Communicative Arts Academy in nearby Compton from 1969 to 1975. It was not only a haven for the community, but a center for art, poetry, music, dance and theatre. He then succeeded Noah Purifoy as Director of the Watts Towers Arts Center from 1975 to 1992. He was a panelist for the California Arts Council and for the National Endowment for the Arts and a member of the Advisory Committee for the Getty Institute for Arts Education, all in 1978 to 1980. Other artists participated in different degrees in the activism of the times. 

This group of artists worked at the height of the Civil Rights Movement and Black Arts Movement and impacted their contemporaries and generations to come. Not only did many of these artists teach formally, but they were generous in sharing their beliefs and many younger artists were impacted by their elders’ deep thinking. Their influence continues to the present; the Hammer Museum’s most recent Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living, found inspiration in the work and life of Noah Purifoy.

TILTON GALLERY

8 East 76 Street New York, NY 10021

www.jacktiltongallery.com

John Outterbridge @ Tilton Gallery, NYC

John Outterbridge 

Tilton Gallery, New York 

February 7 - April 13, 2024 

Tilton Gallery presents an exhibition of works by JOHN OUTTERBRIDGE (1933-2020). This is the artist’s fourth solo show at the gallery and the first comprehensive exhibition since his death in 2020. The exhibition spans his groundbreaking career and includes examples from the 1960s through the 2010s.

An artist, philosopher, thinker, community activist and mentor to other artists, John Outterbridge was born in 1933 in Greenville, North Carolina. He moved to Los Angeles from Chicago in 1963. In Los Angeles, he soon became a central and outspoken figure in the art community that included Noah Purifoy, David Hammons, Betye Saar, John Riddle and many others. He was co-founder and Artistic Director of the Communicative Arts Academy in Compton, CA from 1969-1975 and Director of the Watts Towers Arts Center in South Central Los Angeles from 1975-1992, succeeding his predecessor Noah Purifoy, and continuing to bring the arts and art education into the African American community.

Outterbridge’s work reflects both his experiences in the segregated South of the 1940s and 1950s and his involvement in the Los Angeles Black Arts Movement during the civil rights era. He grew up in a house and community where the re-purposing of discarded materials and objects was a given. His father moved “junk” for a living, storing the objects he collected in the family backyard till they found a new use. In Los Angeles, Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, adjacent to the Watts Towers Arts Center, represented a powerful example of how fragmented, found materials could be repurposed into an object of beauty.

John Outterbridge from early on assembled materials, found objects, and fragments of fabric into works of art that spoke to the human condition. Abstracted from their original uses, these materials became a language of both poetry and politics, commenting both on the history of African Americans in this country and the specific conditions of Black life. Outterbridge’s work evolved from abstraction to figuration and back to abstraction and in all cases found meaning both in the materials he used and how he used them. More often than not, his work spoke through symbolism and poetic metaphor, with titles adding historical references and word play endowing the work with twists of humor.

Throughout his career, John Outterbridge worked in overlapping and at times intertwining series, many of which are represented in this exhibition.

Beginning in the 1960s, John Outterbridge created a large group of works he named the Containment Series. These works were made of hammered and assembled sheets of metal, often combined with wood and leather. He gathered fragments of metal throughout LA, often walking by the railroad tracks with other artist friends, such as John Riddle. He worked the metal by hand till Mark di Suvero, who he met when he worked at the Pasadena Art Museum as preparator and educator, lent him his tools for working with metal when he left the city. Although visually abstract, this body of work speaks to the constraints of slavery and the continuing contemporary containment of Black Americans from freedom.

This was closely followed by the Rag Man Series, works made of sewn and painted canvas, stuffed with fabric to create literal and abstract three-dimensional stuffed and painted canvas “bags”, some with disjunctive American flag images painted on the surfaces. Unfortunately, many of these works have disappeared, but three major works remain: Case in Point, Rag Man Series, 1970 in the collection of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Plus-Tax: Shopping Bag Society, Rag Man Series, 1971 in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., and Jive Ass Bird, Rag Man Series, 1971 in private hands.

Outterbridge’s Ethnic Heritage Series, roughly 1971-1982, is more directly figurative and addresses the question of ancestry. Complex, often abstracted figures reference African sculpture and ethnic effigies. These works extend the early “Rag Man” stuffed canvas shapes, turning them into representations of human figures such as Broken Dance in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Many of the figures from the Ethnic Heritage Series are personalized. Outterbridge carved their heads, placing them atop figures and wood structures that are clothed in colorful scraps of fabric. Urban Man, 1981 shows the head of a man peering out of a large almost space-age entrapment.

Other of these figures are individualized by braided hair and bear beaded necklaces, anklets and other charms, such as in Untitled, 1975 in the present exhibition, a sculpture of a female figure with ornate garments and beads carrying a bucket filled with black eyed peas that especially speaks to her African ethnic heritage. Tribal Figure, Ethnic Heritage Series, c. 1978-82 is a male figure that carries his assembled and ethnic garb and painted features regally.

A particularly strong and mysterious example of these figures, also in our exhibition, is the early Captive Image, Ethnic Heritage Series, c. 1971-72, one of a larger sub-series with this title. This figure exhibits two masklike heads attached to an abstracted torso, symbolic of conflicting public and interior personalities, a forced duality that was part of African American life in days of captivity and still in the present day. Another work from this subseries, also called Captive Image, Ethnic Heritage Series, 1978-82 displays the torso and legs of a figure, thrown across a wooden cart, directly referring to the history of captivity.

Another cart in this show, entitled Missing Mule, Ethnic Heritage Series, 1993 speaks to another theme Outterbridge often returns to in both content and title of numerous works. This cart, missing a mule to draw it, calls attention to the artist’s continuous search for the freedom symbolized by the mule and forty acres promised to slaves upon emancipation and not received; John Outterbridge reasserts his claim for all African Americans.

The mule, usually missing, literally appears, along with more scraps of torn or discarded materials, in an elaborate, otherwise abstract, Untitled wall sculpture of 2006. The long twig in this work, wrapped in these rags, including bits of the American flag, represents family lineage to the artist, referring again to history, both personal and that of the human race.

Outterbridge’s incorporation of the American flag in his work, almost always partial, but recognizable, is another recurring theme throughout his work, from early examples to his very late work.

In the 1990s, John Outterbridge returned to working with metal and wood, all the while continuing his use of discarded bits of fabric, including bits of torn American flags, important in his works from all periods. Window with Footnote, 1991, a metal wall construction with a recessed “window” in which sits a wooden leg, wrapped in fabric strips, as if to heal an injury. From 2009 to 2012, John Outterbridge made a large series of smaller wood and metal sculptures that refer back to instruments of containment as well as healing. I Mus Speak, 2012 in this show contains a small, but complete American flag amidst its otherwise abstract assembled parts.

Rag and Bag Idiom IV, 2012 belongs to one of the last series of works Outterbridge made. Harking back to the early Rag Man Series, they are made of canvas, sewn to construct multiple small irregular three-dimensional shapes, stuffed to maintain these shapes. Smaller than most of the earlier Rag Man works, these are painted in bright multi-colored hues. Remnants of other colored fabric or rags are attached and hang loosely. Dynamic and forceful for their size, these works convey Outterbridge’s inner optimism and add a fresh, new dimension to contemporary abstract art.

Finally, Tilton Gallery presents a re-installation of Rag Factory III. Outterbridge’s series of Rag Factory installations was first conceived for an exhibition in 2011 that was part of the Pacific Standard Time Los Angeles initiative, then a second configuration was shown at The Studio Museum in Harlem, and subsequently a third at our gallery and then at the David Zwirner Gallery in London. Not seen in the U.S. since 2012, this exuberant and playful installation takes the artist’s lifelong interest in the use and re-use of colorful fabric that he always called “rags” to create something akin to a May pole that takes up an entire room.

As expressed in a statement John Outterbridge wrote for the initial installation at LAX, “I see a rag as an object of many vibrations…you can’t escape the importance of the rag, no matter where you go or what you do…because of the colors, because of their previous lives and their histories, rags are pretty much a statement about our social position in the world and the importance of the cast-off. I like using metal a great deal too, or really any material that has a voice…I feel good about the use of rag as an expressive element, but I don’t see it as different than other aspects of my life…Rags have always been in and around the environments I’ve been a part of. With me, art has the audacity to be anything it needs to be at a given time. Anything. Because the creative process is the beginning of all things, no matter what we’re doing or where we are going.”

John Outterbridge has exhibited widely since the late sixties. His work was included in the Pompidou Center’s ground-breaking 2006 exhibition, Los Angeles, 1955-1985: The Birth of an Artistic Capital and in New York at Tilton Gallery in L.A. Object & David Hammons Body Prints, also 2006. His work was represented in six of the Pacific Standard Time 2011-12 exhibitions in Los Angeles, including in Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980. More recently, it was included in the traveling exhibition organized by the Tate Modern, Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power; in Outliers and American Vanguard Art that originated at the National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; and in West by Midwest: Geographies of Art and Kinship at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among a multitude of other important museum group shows. Outterbridge also participated in the 2015 Venice Biennale. He had a solo exhibition, John Outterbridge: Rag Man, at Art + Practice, organized by the Hammer Museum in 2015 that traveled to the Aspen Art Museum. His work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among many others.

TILTON GALLERY

8 East 76 Street New York, NY 10021

www.jacktiltongallery.com

Eduardo Abaroa, Kim Dingle, Huang Yong Ping, John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy, Ruth Vollmer, Gang Zhao @ Tilton Gallery, New York - Empty Legs

Empty Legs - Eduardo Abaroa, Kim Dingle, Huang Yong Ping, John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy, Ruth Vollmer, Gang Zhao

Tilton Gallery, New York

Through March 2021

TILTON GALLERY

Empty Legs

Installation View

© Tilton Gallery

Tilton Gallery presents Empty Legs, an exhibition of artworks that feature legs, or their conspicuous absence. Working around the globe and across generations, each artist uses legs as a way to say something about their attitudes and concerns, in other words, where they stood.

These legs appear in bronze, oil paint, and organic matter. Their absence is articulated by empty items of clothing. They are engaged in their most basic functions - standing, stepping, sitting. These seemingly simple actions accumulate to define where we stand, what we’re doing and even who we are. However, upon closer inspection, we find these particular legs often out of the control of their assumed operators. Legs can be bound, broke or rendered irrelevant; yet even in their absence we can still see what they represented. Legs convey movement and stability and are used as metaphors for agency and freedom.

KIM DINGLE (b. 1951)

Lincoln’s Legs in Loafers with Photo, 1991

In Lincoln’s Legs in Loafers with Photo, Kim Dingle presents a composite portrait of President Abraham Lincoln, juxtaposing his familiar photograph next to a large oil painting of his bare legs. His pants have been stripped to reveal his pale skin, his lower half clad only in the polished black loafers on his feet. The backdrop is a brushy brown, recalling traditional American portrait painting. Both photograph and painting are framed in a dark brown wood. By isolating his legs, Kim Dingle seems to illustrate Lincoln’s literal standing in history. However, something is obviously askew without his pants. His humanity is laid bare and the scene starts to teeter on the absurd: one person’s legs floating against the nebulous backdrop of history. The almost anonymous appendages lack solid ground to stand on, yet still persist and appear before us today.

HUANG YONG PING (1954 – 2019)

Border Crossing, 1999

In Border Crossing, Huang Yong Ping combines two dead snakeskins with a pair of Worker Land leather boots. Absent their original occupant, the boots have been pierced through and are now worn by the pair of twin snakeskins. Each snakehead extends past the rubber toe and their crooked tails trail far behind their heels. The shoes are untied and their laces left dangling by their previous occupant, who seems to have left in a hurry. The boots are staggered on the floor, frozen mid-stride.

Huang made this work in Paris, intended for his second exhibition at Jack Tilton Gallery in 2000. In transit, the works got caught in customs, delayed due to their organic material. Though the exhibition would be postponed and other animal-material would need to be sourced from a pet shop in New Jersey, Border Crossing was ultimately installed near the entrance of his exhibition, TaiGong Fishing, Willing to Bite the Bait, its placement perhaps reflected the in-between status of its title. The boots could have been standing guard as a type of hybrid sentinels, with their threatening mouths agape. Their crooked tails reveal themselves as footprints, evidence of where they’ve been, and perhaps placing them in flight.                                  

“Human snakes” is a term used in Chinese slang for people who are smuggled and thus are used as stand-ins for the experience of “border crossing.” Huang himself became an immigrant in part by happenstance. In 1989 he was in Paris installing his contribution to the famous exhibition, Les Magiciens de la Terre, at the Pompidou when the events of Tiananmen Square unfolded. Huang would never return to China as a resident and became a French citizen, even representing France at the 1999 Venice Biennale. As a global citizen, he experienced first hand the crossing over of identity and cultures, as well as racism every time he traveled.

Untitled, 1995-1997

Untitled consists of two dracaena tree trunks chopped off at both ends. The tropical tree trunks, native to the East but resilient in the West, now wear a pair of UFO-brand blue jeans turned inside out. The ends of the trunks extend beyond the jeans and are elevated off the floor, resting on a wood block. One branch exposes its craggy roots; the other limb is cut clean, almost a foot shorter and papered over with a piece of Kou-Pi plaster. This Chinese healing paper seems to have been applied to as a balm to the wound at the end of the amputated Eastern wood, where its roots have been cut off.

Untitled was originally shown in 1997 in Huang’s first gallery exhibition in America at Jack Tilton Gallery, alongside his seminal installation work, The Pharmacy. The installation consisted of a larger-than-life gourd, filled with traditional Chinese medicines. The organic remedies of dead creatures and earthly powders would have seemed far removed from the sterile minimalism of Western medicine. In Untitled, we find an Eastern transplant located in a Western land, dressed up but injured, being treated with an Eastern remedy. Through this hybrid figure, Huang doesn’t seem to reconcile the incompatibilities of East and West, but rather exposes them and the resultant wounds on the level of the individual.

Huang Yong Ping wrote for the original press release that “Although this project was labeled “untitled” one may easily find that it vividly illustrates the newly immigrated artists’ dilemma: their cultural root has been pulled out from their original earth, and their artistic life still attempts to survive and develop, in spite of bearing a contemporary Western icon – jeans.”

JOHN OUTTERBRIDGE (1933 – 2020)

Captive Image #4, Ethnic Heritage Series, c. 1974-1976

John Outterbridge began his Ethnic Heritage Series in 1971, creating a group of dolls, made from found materials, as a way to explain the Black experience of living in America to his young daughter. Over the next decade, he created a number of Captive Image works, which specifically address the restrictions placed upon Black Americans. The figure in Captive Image #4 appears as a prisoner, with the symbolic number “12” emblazoned in paint across its chest and its legs adorned in black and white prison stripes.

The figure confronts us with its legs, anatomically larger in scale than the rest of its body. These legs protrude out at the viewer in different directions through the bends of its knees and ankles. Outterbridge does not depict the figure’s chains or bondage in a literal way, as the simple prisons stripes make clear their own form of stricture. Though the figure seems to be seated, its legs are uplifted and perhaps orchestrated by some sort of absent puppet-master manipulating them above. They flail and struggle to reach the floor. With its feet off the ground, the figure has lost its literal connection to the world. We look up from the legs to see an antenna straining out and upward from its neck. The slender but sturdy antenna appears as its last connection to the outside world, seeking to take in information but with no microphone or mouthpiece, the figure is rendered mute.

John Outterbridge stated in 1977 about his ‘dolls’ that “It has only been in recent times that the doll has come to be known as a toy. Despite its current representation, the doll as an inanimate object has continued to embrace life and energy through a resemblance of mankind.”

NOAH PURIFOY (1923 – 2004)

Hanging Tree, 1990

Hanging Tree is an assemblage wall-work consisting of assorted fabrics, a mop head, and a jagged tree branch affixed across its top. The fabrics fit together to form multiple planes of color, with an abstracted figure at its center that can be read as suspended from the tree. The white hairs of the mop hint at a head while two vertical planes of striped and plaid fabric form legs. Emerging from the pant legs are two forms of bright orange fabric appearing as feet. The tips of the feet protrude past the bottom edge ever so slightly, jutting out just enough to seem to dangle.

Made in his first full year at Joshua Tree after leaving Los Angeles, Hanging Tree incorporates familiar elements of his earlier assemblage wall-works that were intended for the indoors. The branch on top adds a natural element, bringing in a bit of the desert that would define his late, site-specific works intended for the outdoors. The disillusion he felt in Los Angeles might have been reflected in a bit of ominous text printed on the black fabric at the center of the work. In a proto-digital alarm-clock font, the text reads: “computers are killing our brains.” In a larger context, Hanging Tree is both a direct reference to the long history of the lynching of Black men in America and an abstracted commentary on the dangers faced by Black people still today.

RUTH VOLLMER (1903 - 1982)

Walking Ball, 1959

Walking Ball is a bronze sculpture consisting of a central spherical mass from which six appendages protrude. The sphere and accompanying limbs form a sort of abstract animal-like figure, standing on three of its legs directly on the floor, the others lifted in the air. The rough surface of the bronze is intentionally left unpolished and tactile. These functional legs, of varying lengths, work together with the viewer to animate the sculpture. It can stand in multiple poses and when shifted, it can even walk.

Ruth Vollmer worked as a window-dresser, designer and educator upon her arrival in New York after fleeing Germany during World War II. Marked by both tragedy and growth, the year 1959 proved pivotal. When her husband committed suicide, Ruth took a step in her own direction, taking a studio and beginning her career as an artist in earnest.  Despite the losses in her life, Vollmer filled her world with the joys of friendship, geometry and nature. Vollmer held salons in her home for artists like Mel Bochner, Sol LeWitt, Robert Smithson and Richard Tuttle. Emerging as a sort-of maternal influence, Ruth developed a close relationship with Eva Hesse. Though years apart in age, both were German refugees in America. Their friendship included trips to source industrial materials for Hesse’s work and a vacation together to Mexico. Ruth’s early influence could potentially be found in Hesse’s own kinetic work, “Legs of a Walking Ball” from 1965.

Ruth Vollmer showed with Betty Parsons from 1960. Her estate has been represented by Tilton Gallery since the closing of the Betty Parsons Gallery after Betty’s death in 1982.

EDUARDO ABAROA (b. 1968)

Sociopathic Real Estate Item #34701, 2004

Sociopathic Real Estate Item #34701 joins three objects: a globe, a dollhouse, and a pair of blue jeans. The globe, an educational resource for young and old, occupies almost the entire interior of the metal home, resting on its side with its base affixed to a wall. A pair of blue jeans with a belt attempts to contain the dollhouse, covering one edge of the roof and resting underneath the house, inserting itself as an uneven foundation. The undone belt and unzipped jeans are empty; the dark denim pant legs lie vacant on the ground. While the dollhouse may imply a notion of the perfect home, it is undercut by the loose pair of jeans, symbolic of the missing owner, that tries, but fails, to entirely contain either the home or the globe, the world, within.

GANG ZHAO (b. 1961)

Soldier After War, 2006

Soldier After War is an oil painting of a lone figure standing in a military uniform. The title marks the figure as a soldier in the aftermath of conflict. What begins as a straightforward portrait shifts, as we see his torso has been sliced at the hip and slid to the right. His upper body floats amid the brown background. His legs and coattails remain standing where they were. While his stately pose presents him as a proud, unaffected soldier, the bisection of his body reveals the psychological state of a man at war. The soldier is also a stand-in for the artist and his self-perceived struggles to make his mark on the art world.

Untitled, 2006

In Untitled, we see a statue being lifted into a blue-gray sky by a pair of cables and hooks, hoisted away from its prominent perch atop a building. The statue seems to float for a second, the weight of its stone mass tilting it uneasily forward just as its aerial support kicks in. The operator of the cables is unseen, just as the sculpted figure is unidentified. The scene is at once anonymous and universal. Set in stone and designed to stand in one place for eternity, the legs of the statue were bound together from the beginning.

Empty Legs has been organized by Jacob Billiar. Simultaneous with this exhibition, Tilton Gallery presents a group show of selected works by Egan Frantz, Tomashi Jackson, Yashua Klos, Antone Könst, Jarbas Lopes, John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy, Joyce Scott, Berend Strik, Martha Tuttle, Cosima von Bonin and Brenna Youngblood.

TILTON GALLERY

8 East 76 Street New York, NY 10021

www.jacktiltongallery.com