Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

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For the historic Surrealists, working with found objects—often gathered from the streets and flea markets of Paris—was a means of challenging the primacy of reason over emotion and crafting poetic associations intended to invoke the creative power of the subconscious mind. Artists working in the 1960s relied on similar techniques to create their assemblages and collages, but, by this time, these methods had evolved from their Surrealist roots to offer a means of opening up new associations with contemporary social or political conditions. The Bay Area artists associated with Bruce Connor’s Rat Bastard Protective Association (active 1957–60) challenged commercial tendencies with inflammatory work that made use of materials like discarded junk and storefront signage. In Southern California and Texas, the satirical and often vulgar sculptures of Edward Kienholz became widely influential. And in South Central Los Angeles, Noah Purifoy and Judson Powell organized the 1966 exhibition 66 Signs of Neon, which included works made in the aftermath of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, illustrating the importance of assemblage as a means for community self-expression. One participant in the exhibition, John Outterbridge, proclaimed that the foundations of the works’ meaning were “not merely material but the material and essence of the political climate.”

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A large, charred, burnt wooden surface with layers of paint, numbers, stars, and abstract shapes partially visible underneath.

Following the Watts Rebellion—a series of violent confrontations between police and residents of predominantly Black Los Angeles neighborhoods in 1965—Noah Purifoy sought to give new life to the masses of rubble littering his neighborhood streets. He scavenged charred wood, chunks of smashed automobiles, melted neon signage, and other materials he called "jewels" from the debris, repurposing them in his work and the exhibition 66 Signs of Neon, which opened in Watts in 1966 before traveling nationwide.

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

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Noah Purifoy, Untitled (66 Signs of Neon), 1966

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