“There is another world, but it is in this one,” said Surrealist poet Paul Éluard. In this exhibition, artists look to the future, imagining how we move forward from the tumultuous events of the past year. [read more]
Art in the Plague Year is an online exhibition organized by UCR ARTS: California Museum of Photography and curated by Douglas McCulloh, Nikolay Maslov, and Rita Sobreiro Souther. UCR ARTS’s programs are supported by UCR College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, the City of Riverside, Altura Credit Union, and Anheuser-Busch.
All works in this exhibition are reproduced with permission of the artists/copyright holders. Works (images, video, audio or other content) must not be used or reproduced for any purposes other than fair use without prior consent of the artists.
(b. 1963, Buffalo, NY. Lives and works in Joshua Tree, CA)
Bill Green’s photographs are art depicting art. He made the images in late light at the Noah Purifoy Outdoor Art Museum in Joshua Tree. “Because Purifoy’s installations deal with the idea of what society originally meant, what it has become, and what it might become, the site takes on even darker tones in the fading daylight.” Green himself is a Joshua Tree resident.
Noah Purifoy was a pioneering Black artist based in Southern California. Between 1989 and 2004, at the end of a long and immensely productive life, Purifoy worked on a 10-acre site three miles north of central Joshua Tree. There he constructed a vast array of open-air assemblage, sculpture, and installation art. It’s a wonderland of creative expression that ranges from the quirkily personal to sharply political. Purifoy referred to his pieces as “environmental sculpture.” For Purifoy, slow dissolution in the abrasive Mojave climate is part of the process. “Changes are an integral part of life itself.” Viewed under lowering skies by Bill Green’s camera, Purifoy’s constructions become “disjointed silhouettes that meld with the surrounding natural environment,” a larger predictor of shadowed decay and disintegration.
