Noah Purifoy Outdoor Museum of Assemblage Art in New York Times

Joshua Tree, Calif.

Noah Purifoy Outdoor Desert Museum of Assemblage Art (1989-2004)

Artists are often drawn to land art because their visions can’t be contained by “the antiseptic, climate-controlled, never-changing white box of the gallery,” says Govan. The artist Noah Purifoy made his name in the mid-1960s with sculptures he created from materials burned in the Watts Rebellion. As he got older, “he couldn’t make the scale of work he wanted in the studio or museum,” Govan says. Priced out of Los Angeles, he found a creative home in the Mojave Desert, where he spent his final 15 years building an open-air museum filled with fun-house sculptures made of repurposed materials like toilet seats, chain-link fencing and tires.