Last week we discovered the art of Purvis Young (1943-2010). Purvis grew up in the historically African-American Miami neighborhood called “Overtown”. A poor neighborhood occupying prime territory, it has been in the crosshairs of real estate developers for years. One early incursion into the area occurred with the insertion of I-195, a brutal scar of cement that disdainfully carries vehicles over the neighborhood to other, hipper locales.
As a teenager, Purvis was sent to prison in north Florida, and he returned a changed man. Vowing never to repeat the type of crime that resulted in his incarceration, he took up painting and found inspiration in the neighborhood that sheltered him. As a self-taught artist, his style is classified as outsider/folk art, although its sophistication leads some to consider it as Abstract Expressionism. Young’s large quick brush strokes craft ephemeral scenes that utilize repetition of figures and motifs to express his “inner eye”. Using found objects, such as scrap lumber, discarded books, magazines, and fabric, Purvis’s works are richly textured and complex. He rarely strayed from his self-described responsibility as an observer and recorder of the Black experience. Favorite motifs included wild horses, ladders, angels in chains, pregnant women, social unrest, and boats, many expressions of the desire to escape the limitations of the black man’s world.
His works appear in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C.; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the American Folk Art Museum, New York, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and the de Young Museum, San Francisco. The Fort Lauderdale Purvis Young Museum is another place to see Young’s work.
Despite this, we had never seen his art, so we were thrilled to spend a week learning about Purvis and seeing his work at Pan American Art Projects, Bakehouse Art Complex, and the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas Biscayne Nature Center gallery. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did.
Going to Art Basel, N.D.
Some Chapters of My Life, N.D.
My Home in Overtown, 80’s
My Respect to Pollock, N.D.
Freedom for All, N.D.
The World is Round, N.D.
Horses in the Dark, N.D.
Big Crowd over the City N.D.
The mural below is one of three surviving Young murals and can be found on the eastern exterior wall of the Bakehouse Art Complex in the Wynwood area of Miami. Wynwood, is of course, now famous for its profuse graffiti art, but the Young mural predates that era and speaks to the very earliest blossoming of Miami’s street art scene, and more broadly, the city’s growing appreciation for the arts, an appreciation which helped change Sin City into a world-class arts destination.
Mural, c. 1998-2003
Moved by his story and his art, we couldn’t resist bringing one home:
Horses and Ladders, ND
In his own words:
On the black experience: “I ain’t got time to criticize the system too much, but I paint what I see.”
On the Vietnam War: “My feeling was that the world might be better if I put up my protests. I figured the world might get better, it might not, but it was just something I had to be doing. I make like I’m a warrior, like God sending an angel to stop war. I think, like, I’m one of the figures in my art.”
On heroes: “When I started the figure painting, I liked to show good peoples, the heroes, like that. They fight for a cause. They done good things, they helped the struggle, you know.”
On Overtown: “Shotgun houses used to be all around that place. But they all looked alike, you know, and the city had a problem with that, and tore the houses down. And they built apartments to take the place of the shotgun houses. Things like that, it made me want to express my feelings. People told me if I did that in another country, I’d have disappeared.”
On his subject matter:
“There’s a lot of stuff in my paintings people wanted to ask about back then. Like locks. I put locks in my paintings. A lot of people are locked up, struggling. The lock is playing a key part. It means mostly something’s wrong.”
“I have painted a lot of boat people. I mostly see the boat people struggling. I see them on the news. Where the boats turn over, or they get turned around, sent back.”
“I always liked to draw and paint horse, wild horses. I just use horses mainly for freedom. I love to paint wild horses, freedom horses, wild horses running free.”
I paint funerals and graveyard because I see a lot of my friends pass. I been to a lot of funerals. I paint angels coming down to bless the peoples, guys carrying caskets sometimes, angel sitting right on top of the caskets.”
“Every day I see in life pregnant women. I try to tell them in my paintings that the pregnant woman is the birth of the earth. She represent some of the problems I see in the city. She’s given birth to some of the characters around. But the way I feel about it is, they’re all giving birth to angels.”
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