Documentary, directed by Jesse Lerner and Sara Harris, 71 minutes, 2021.

“The Fragmentations Only Mean…” is an audiovisual landscape of the Noah Purifoy Outdoor Museum, located in the California high desert. In 1986 Noah Purifoy (1917- 2004) retired from his position of many years on the California Arts Council and moved to a remote desert site north of Joshua Tree National Park, where, over the last eighteen years of his life, he created an ambitious series of over a hundred assemblage sculptures which sprawl over acres of the harsh, arid land, and address issues of North American history, race relations, social justice, contemporary philosophy, and human interactions with and impact upon the environment.

  • Jesse Lerner

    Jesse Lerner is a filmmaker based in Los Angeles. His films have won numerous prizes at film festivals in the United States, Latin America, and Japan, and have screened at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Mexico’s Museo Nacional de Antropología, Washington’s National Gallery, Madrid’s Reina Sofía, and the Sundance, Rotterdam and Los Angeles Film Festivals. His films were featured in mid-career surveys at New York’s Anthology Film Archives, Washington’s National Gallery, and Mexico’s Cineteca Nacional. He has curated projects for the Mexico’s Palacio Nacional de Bellas Artes, the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao, and the Robert Flaherty Seminar.  His books include F is for Phony (2000, with Alexandra Juhasz), The Shock of Modernity (2007), The Maya of Modernism: Art, Architecture, and Film (2011), Ismo, Ismo, Ismo (2017, with Luciano Piazza), L.A. Collects L.A. (2017, with Rubén Ortiz Torres), and The Catherwood Project (2017, with Leandro Katz).  He is a professor in the Intercollegiate Media Studies program of the Claremont Colleges.

    Filmography

    How Many Stars, How Many Stripes? (1990, short, co-dir), Natives (1991, short, co-dir), Frontierland/Fronterilandia (1995, doc, co-dir), Mexopolis (1997, short, co-dir), Ruins (doc, 1999), The American Egypt (2001, doc), T.S.H. (2004, short), Magnavoz (2006, short), Atomic Sublime (2010, doc), La Piedra Ausente (2013, doc, co-dir).

  • Sara Harris

    I believe in the practice of listening to landscapes, moments, and the power of holding those in recorded sound as a gift to the future. I believe that sound can be the most visual medium. For over 20 years, I’ve made my living as an audio artist and public radio journalist in Los Angeles and México, focusing on issues of land-use, climate change, and environmental justice. For three years in the wake of the 2008 recession, I hosted Hear in the City: Radio Realities from the Urban Landscape on KPFK, 90.7FM.  tenure as L.A. bureau chief of Youth Radio at NPR West. My stories can be found on Marketplace , All Things Considered , Morning Edition, Living on Earth , and Mexico’s IMER national network. One of my favorite collaborative endeavors as an artist is: RadioSonideros- a collective whose works have been commissioned for The New York Port Authority’s FM Ferry Experiment, Metabolic Studio’s Not a Cornfield: The Roots of the Park, at the Los Angeles State Historic Park, and The Sounds of Cesar Chavez for the L.A.’s Great Streets Initiative with the Boyle Heights Arts Conservatory, and a 2019 artist-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts. In the teaching realm, I have produced multimedia documentary with teens at award-winning nonprofit ArtworxLA, and with journalism students in at Lázaro Cárdenas H.S. in Tijuana for Las AudioPostales: cross-border radio conversations.