Episode No. 190 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features curators Yael Lipschutz and Anne-Lise Desmas.

It speaks to several bifurcations in American art that Noah Purifoy, an African-American artist who spent his career in and around Los Angeles, can be described by Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight as a “pivotal American artist” of the last fifty years, while the head of modern and contemporary art at the National Gallery of Art admits he had never heard of Purifoy before the NGA vultured the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s collection.

A new retrospective, titled “Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art should help fix some of that. The exhibition includes work Purifoy made between 1958 and his death in 2004, and includes both stand-alone sculptures and examples of installations that are usually only on view at Purifoy’s famed Joshua Tree Outdoor Museum. The exhibition, which is on view through September 27, was curated by Franklin Sirmans and by my first guest, Yael Lipschutz. She’s an independent curator and the archivist of the Noah Purifoy Foundation.

On the second segment, one of the most significant American museum acquisitions of the year. J. Paul Getty Museum curator Anne-Lise Desmas discusses the Getty’s acquisition of Bernini’s 1621 Bust of Pope Paul V, which had been more-or-less lost for a hundred years.

Air date: June 24, 2015.