Celebrating Black History Month at Frieze LA 2025: Noah Purifoy

Celebrating Black History Month at Frieze Los Angeles

Fair presentations, onsite projects, Frieze Week gallery shows and institutional exhibitions foregrounding Black history across Los Angeles

February 14, 2025

Black History Month recognizes the generations of African Americans who struggled with adversity to achieve full citizenship in American society. As ‘Repossessions’ opens at the California African American Museum (CAAM) and the Getty Center surveys the practice of María Magdalena Campos-Ponsand, at Frieze Los Angeles, artists such as Zanele Muholi, Emmanuel Louisnord Desir, Noah Purifoy and Akinsanya Kambon shed new light on Black history.

This year, Frieze also extends its community-led initiatives, partnering with Summaeverythang Community Center – Lauren Halsey’s South Central LA nonprofit that ‘develops Black and Brown personal, political, economic and sociocultural empowerment’ – and collaborating with The Black Trustee Alliance to capture the legacy of Altadena’s Black and POC communities in the aftermath of the Eaton fire.

Here are just some of the celebrations of Black history and culture happening at the fair and across the city during Frieze Week LA, 17–23 February.

At the Fair

Renowned LA artist Noah Purifoy found his own sandy stretch in Joshua Tree, where he moved to live in 1989. In the wake of LA’s Watts riots of 1965, Purifoy created works from the burned debris. This use of found materials came to define Purifoy’s practice, and in the last 15 years of his life, he assembled discarded objects to create 100 sculptures to populate his surrounding ten acres of desert. Sculptures and collages from this period – most of them not seen in LA – are the focus of Tilton Gallery’s presentation at Frieze Los Angeles.

Noah Purifoy is presented by Tilton Gallery at Frieze Los Angeles 2025.