He was one of South Florida's most storied artists, a man who transformed a troubled life with brush strokes, painting the joys and sorrows of his people on objects discarded in his Overtown neighborhood -- a copious body of work that brought Purvis Young international recognition.
Yet Young, who died early Tuesday at Jackson Memorial Hospital after a long battle with diabetes, was penniless and friends were raising money to bury him.
He was 67.
Self-taught, Young loved to tell the story of how he turned his life around in the mid-1960s by painting vibrant murals and conceptualizing mixed-media expressionist works. He said he found his calling after serving a prison term for breaking and entering when an angel told him, ``This is not your life.''
``He had a very powerful personal voice,'' said art collector Mera Rubell. ``We can all celebrate someone who experienced such terrible circumstances in his life -- prison, destitution -- but who found art powerfully redeeming. You usually write off people who find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. For most people that's the end of the story. For Purvis, it was the beginning of the story.''
Young made exquisite, thoughtful art from the garbage he plucked off the streets of Overtown. Abandoned doors, cardboard, pieces of wood became canvases on which he painted faceless figures and horses that celebrated freedom and angels that he believed healed and guided his life. His interpretation of the flaws and beauty of Overtown introduced the neighborhood to the world of art and vice versa.
``I come alive at night,'' he told a Miami Herald reporter in an interview last year. ``That's when I do most of my painting.''
His work was included in all of the major private collections in Miami and was exhibited at major art museums across the country. Several of his works are part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
`A GREAT' GENIUS``Purvis was one of the great geniuses of American art, a remarkable figure,'' said Jacquelyn Serwer, chief curator of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, which breaks ground in 2012. ``He wasn't particularly nurtured, yet was driven to do this work. He was just one of those people who was born with this extraordinary vision and stayed true to it, producing work that had a kind of mythical quality to it.''
Through his stylized figures, the Liberty City-born artist offered the narrative of urban Miami, its changing faces, the social impact of poverty, crime and displacement of his surroundings.
Among his subjects: blues and jazz musicians who made magic in the 1940s and '50s; neighborhoods choked by the oppression of racism.
``You are talking about art that literally jumped off the canvas, or the wood, or the metal or whatever he painted on,'' said Clare Vickery, owner of Grace Cafe and Galleries in Dania Beach, which sold Young works. ``People who had never seen his work and people who had known art all of their lives were transfixed by his work. It was so full of life, passion, sadness, triumph and defeat.''
In 2000, the Wynwood-based Rubell Family Collection purchased the contents of Young's studio -- works created between 1985-1999 -- with the aim of cataloging and donating the work to public U.S. institutions. Two years ago, the Rubells donated a collection of 109 Young paintings valued at more than $1 million to Morehouse College in Atlanta. The works now hang at the college's Martin Luther King Chapel.