About the artist
1943-2010, lived and worked in Miami, FloridaBorn in Liberty City, Miami in 1943, the painter Purvis Young is intimately linked to Overtown, another Miami neighborhood that has provided inspiration, raw material, and audience for his constructed paintings. A deep-seated sense of place and of history suffuses Young’s ecstatic, rhythmic surfaces; his story is likewise the story of his longtime community. When Young was a boy, local residents would only recently have begun to insist on referring to their district as Overtown rather than “Colored Town,” as it had been known since before the turn of the century. This once-prosperous “Harlem of the South” boomed early as a segregated African American sector, only to be partially razed and entirely dislocated by the construction of I-95 and I-395 in the 1960s, which threw the displaced community and the landscape into disarray and despair. Overtown remains a poverty-stricken, violence-prone, and largely derelict area to this day, but the artworld attention paid Purvis—and since the 2006 documentary Purvis of Overtown, the filmworld accolades as well––have helped “Towners” put a public face on their heroic recent renewal efforts.
The roads that led Young back to Miami, and to Overtown, were tangled and fraught. A three-year stint in North Florida’s Raiford State Penitentiary (1961–64) for breaking and entering brought the young man’s tentative career in petty crime and pool hustling to a close. During long hours at the Overtown Public Library, he pored over art history books and images of murals––so-called “Freedom Walls”––in Northern inner cities. His own vision of community uplift and beautification began with a large-scale public mural on Good Bread Alley in Overtown, close to the zone torn apart by the interstates. The work was eventually disassembled and destroyed, but Young continued his prolific bricoleur’s practice, piecing together salvaged wood, metal, and other materials as canvasses. Examining motifs of both modern African-American history and a more distant African heritage, Young used housepaint, gathering his trademark galloping horses, dancing silhouettes, mask-like faces, and portraits of jazz musicians onto electric, multihued compositions. The loose, gestural paint-handling reflects concerns at once spiritual and immediately grounded. Improvisatory movement and a documentary impulse––however abstract in execution––remained central preoccupations of this self-styled “urban expressionist.” Young's work can be found in the Studio Museum of Harlem, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Newark Museum, and in prestigious public and private collections worldwide.
—Brendan Greaves
Above: Photo ©Jimmy Hedges, courtesy of Rising Fawn Gallery, Chattanooga, TN.
Bibliography
Arnett, William, and Paul Arnett, eds. Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art from the South, Volume 1. Atlanta, Georgia: Tinwood Books in association with Schomburg Center for Research in Black Cultures, New York, 2000.
Hartigan, Lynda Roscoe. “Going Urban: American Folk Art and the Great Migration,” American Art 14, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 26-51.
Keeping the Faith: An Exhibition of Religious Folk Art. St. Louis, MO: Center of Contemporary Art, 1999.
McEvilley, Thomas. “The Missing Tradition.” Art in America (May 1997): 78-85.
Moreno, Gean. “Purvis Young’s Predicament,” Raw Vision 36 (Fall 2001)
Purvis of Overtown. 77Films/Rural Studios Production, directed by Shaun Conrad and David Raccuglia, 66 min., color, 2006.
Purvis Young. Miami, FL: Joy Moos Gallery, 1993.
Purvis Young: Contemporary Urban Painter, video, directed by David Seehausen, produced by Skot Foreman and David Seehausen, 30 min, color, 1997.
Purvis Young: Painting the Blues. Springfield, OH: Springfield Museum of Art, 1998.
Self-Taught Artists of the 20th Century: An American Anthology. New York: Museum of American Folk Art, in association with Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1998.
A World of their Own: Twentieth Century American Folk Art. Newark, NJ: The Newark Museum, 1995.
Wrestling with History: A Celebration of African American Self-Taught Artsts from the Collection of Ronald and June Shelp. New York: Baruch College/Sidney Mishkin Gallery, 1996.
Yelen, Alice Rae. Passionate Visions of the American South: Self-Taught Artists from 1940 to the Present. New Orleans: New Orleans Museum of Art in association with University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 1994.