The Heidelberg Project

I was first exposed to trash as art when I visited the Noah Purifoy Outdoor Desert Art Museum in Joshua Tree, California. What with its arch made of toilet bowls and stacked-up television sets as a commentary on media, a burgeoning trash art lover in myself found its Michelangelo. Alabama-born Noah Purifoy was a Black pioneer in this form of assemblage sculpture pieces using large-scale found materials or what can easily be labeled as trash. With a recent UCLA Hammer Museum retrospective and other spotlights, Mr. Purifoy is iconic in our assemblage art consciousness. The museum is in a fitting location near Salvation Mountain, that huge Christian Surrealist installation by Leonard Knight that makes you feel like what it would be like if you took LSD at church with Salvador Dali.

Nearby is also the found art community of East Jesus that visualizes what if Mad Max spent his after hours after a day of being a Road Warrior as a modern art assemblage sculptor and started a community of hippies and art outcasts. Then, there’s the Salton Sea, that once abandoned glamorous “seaside” resort, now taking every bit of its celebratory decay into an art form with installations around its once downfall. With these outsider art meccas planted all through Southern California, as a punk growing up in L.A., my aesthetics were based on these exposures. Your junkyard, my art gallery, crept into my taste palate.

Created by artist Tyree Guyton, who grew up on Heidelberg Street (the namesake of this place), it was a magnetic effort to unite the community to make this abandoned area into a revolutionary space for advocacy through the arts with installations that challenged not only the status quo of the art world but also a jolt of consciousness for political messaging that needed to be seen. Whether it’s about government corruption or racism, there are societal critiques alluded to or actually written on it, such as “Trump Shit News” on an abandoned TV set. Due to its varied controversial (to some) topics being displayed, some of his large-scale pieces were victims of arson. Also, there were moments when bulldozers just came in and destroyed a piece without any consultation or warning. IN OTHER WORDS, GO SEE IT NOW.

It can either be wiped out completely for the sake of “urban renewal” with “careful displays” or signs commenting on what once stood there amidst condominiums ironically labeled The Heidelberg. Visualize the lobby of this Heidelberg condo nightmare, and it will have black and white grainy street photography of the Heidelberg Project with Art Deco frames as an homage to its edgy past. (Note: you could have gone inside CBGB’s in New York or the Hong Kong Cafe in L.A.’s Chinatown to see examples of that varnish.) Before that eventually happens, go see it still in its purest form. The Heidelberg Project needs the same attention as our cherished Noah Purifoy Outdoor Desert Museum. See it before the condo condors descend upon this outsider art paradise.