Purvis Young
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Purvis Young, born February 4, 1943, Liberty City, Miami, Florida is a folk artist now living in Overtown, Miami, Florida.[1] His life story was captured in the 2006 feature length documentary film, Purvis of Overtown.
Contents |
[edit] Biography
The artist has lived all of his life in Overtown, Miami’s black ghetto. The once prosperous black community in which Purvis was born and grew up was at the time billed as the “Harlem of the South”. It was destroyed by the building of Highway I-95 and is now largely populated by crack-heads, their dealers, prostitutes and pimps. Adjoining the compound where Young lives with his common law wife is an alley called “ Bucket of Blood“ with the highest incidence of murder in the greater Miami area.
Young learned to paint while serving a three-year sentence in prison, after being arrested as a teenager for breaking and entering.
“When I was in my cell one night, “ Purvis remembers,” I woke up and the angels came to me and I told ‘em, you know, hey man this is not my life – and they said they were gonna make a way for me, you know…”
That way was Art. If any man can bear testimony to the value of the Public Library system that man is Purvis Young.
“He’s like a kind of Rocky figure because he’s a person that’s had a lot of adversity in his life and he hasn’t had a lot of education or a lot of advantages, but he’s educated himself,” states Barbara Young, Miami Art Reference Librarian.
It’s in the Overtown Library - which he would one day adorn with his own murals - that he discovered Rembrandt and Vincent van Gogh, two of his heroes. Purvis’ early drawings gradually reveal a growing mastery. Old books that the library was discarding became his sketch pads.
[edit] Painting
Because he could never afford canvas, Purvis paints on every surface available to him - discarded plywood and cardboard, refrigerator doors, table tops, scraps of fabric and metal trays, all often brought to him by people in his neighborhood.
Even though Young has been confined to a ghetto of another sort- that of “Outsider Art “ - his highly expressionistic work can best be described as “magic realism“.
It is populated with angels which watch over turbulent cityscapes; faces reminiscent of an imagined Zulu past life, and symbols of freedom and escape - wild horses, trucks, and the flimsy craft that the boat people from Haiti use to journey to these shores, plowing through shark infested waters.
“I paint what I sees…I paint the problems of the world.“ says Young simply, and in public he wears dark glasses to “hide his tears” at the injustice and sadness he sees every day.
“I look at the wildlife-" says Young, referring to the National Geographic channel, which he watches on T.V. while painting, in alternation with the History channel. “I see the butterfly go from here to Mexico and the wild geese go from here to South America. I look at stuff like that and I say that’s the way I want to be free.”
[edit] Exhibits
Purvis Young’s work can be seen at:
Daniel Aubry Gallery, 100 West 23rd Street, New York, NY, 212.414.0014
Skot Foreman Fine Art, New York, NY, 212.452.2000
Museum of American Folk Art, New York, NY
New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA
Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington, DC
Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, FL
[edit] References
- ^ Kristin G. Congdon, Tina Bucuvalas, Just Above the Water: Florida Folk Art, Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2006, p269. ISBN 1578067782
