Noah Purifoy (right) with his sculpture “Barrel and Plow” (1966), which was included in the “66 Signs of Neon” exhibition.
Credit...© 2026 courtesy of the Noah Purifoy Foundation. Photo: Harry Drinkwater, courtesy of the Estate of Harry Drinkwater
The New York Times Style Magazine
The 25 Sculptures that Define the Modern Age
Four artists and a curator debate the most important works since the end of World War II
August 4, 2026
By M.H. Miller, Phoebe Chen, Rose Courteau, Julia Halperin, Zoey Poll and Michael Snyder
7. Noah Purifoy, “66 Signs of Neon,” 1966
In August 1965, the Alabama-born Noah Purifoy, the founding director of the Watts Towers Arts Center — a southern Los Angeles arts-education site near the monumental folk-art towers built by Simon Rodia — watched as fires broke out only four blocks away. The weeklong uprising in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Watts, a response to police violence, residential segregation and economic exclusion, consumed entire streets, leaving behind heaps of charred refuse. Afterward, Purifoy and his fellow artist Judson Powell pulled a wagon through the roads, picking up whatever caught their eye: liquefied neon signs, twisted pieces of steel, warped piano pedals, blackened photographs and a lot of burnt wood (which the artist Ed Ruscha said Purifoy used “as a painter might cadmium red”). The pair then transformed these scraps into assemblages with a Dadaist spirit. Purifoy saw the project as a tool for social change and soon invited other artists to make their own found-object works from his three-ton stockpile. The resulting series, “66 Signs of Neon,” comprised 66 pieces (as they were sold, new works were created to maintain this number), including Purifoy’s improvised suit of armor, “Sir Watts,” and his shattered-windshield sculpture, “Sudden Encounter.” A show of the works toured nationally, and many of them didn’t survive, but the artists, at least temporarily, managed to introduce the country to the ethos behind what Purifoy called “junk art,” which, he wrote, “illustrated […] the imposition of order on disorder, the creation of beauty from ugliness.” — Z.P.
Miller: What about Noah Purifoy?
Shechet: I love his work, but I think Betye Saar is a better choice.
Pendleton: I agree.
Katrib: I was going to put Betye Saar down, but then I was also just like, which is the piece?
Shechet: “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima” (1972).
Gaines: Their works are so different.
Katrib: Betye Saar’s work is obviously sculptural, but for me it somehow doesn’t fit. I also think Noah Purifoy dealing with refuse — it’s really loaded, intense material. Junk, but not just junk. It’s very specific junk. That transformative element of material is very apt today because that’s what so many people are doing.