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PURVIS YOUNG
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Partial List of Museums:
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC Museum of American Folk
Art, New York, NY New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA Corcoran
Museum of Art, Washington, DC Newark Museum, Newark, NJ Bass Museum of
Art, Miami Beach, FL Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL Boca Raton
Museum, FL Philadelphia Museum, PA High Museum, Atlanta Tampa Museum, FL
Studio Museum, Harlem, NY Selected
Exhibitions: Purvis
Young, Galerie Karsten Greves, Paris, France An American Anthology,
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA Bearing Witness, Schomberg
Museum, New York, NY Souls Grown Deep, Emory University Museum, Atlanta,
GA Purvis Young, Miami Museum of Modern Art, Miami, FL Smithsonian
Collection, Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, FL Painting The Blues,
Springfield Museum of Art, Springfield, OH Pictured In My Mind,
Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Purvis Young: Paintings, Ricco/Maresca
Gallery, New York, NY Purvis Young, Eileen West Gallery, Seaside, FL,
“Raw Treasure”, Joy Moos Gallery, Miami, FL Selected
Publications:
“Souls Grown Deep”, Tinwood Books “Report From Miami: Part II”,
Art In America “An American Anthology”, Museum of American Folk Art
“Miami: Purvis Young”, ARTnews “Going Urban”, American Art
Magazine “Pictured In My Mind”, Seaside Times “Purvis Young”,
Birmingham Museum of Art “The Scene Heats Up Under the Miami Sun”,
NY Times ______________________________________________________________________________________________________ |
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“Every
day,” says Purvis Young, “I prays to be great.” And then he goes
to work. “He can’t stop painting,” his friend Brance
Joldas says. “He needs to paint 10 hours, 15 hours a day, whatever it
takes. And he’s been doing that for forty years.” The
abandoned, rat infested warehouses in Overtown that he has used as his
studios for 25 years are in the most violent crime areas in Miami FL.
Despite the fact that Young is an internationally celebrated artist in over fifty museums including the Smithsonian, the Corcoran, and
important private collections such as the Rubells, he will not leave his home place. Born
in 1943, the artist has transcended huge obstacles in his path to
greatness. His once prosperous and healthy neighborhood has descended
into chaos and crime. When the new I95 cut off Overtown it became
increasingly populated by those who were cut off from the mainstream.
Caught up in desperate circumstances, Young himself did three years in
prison for breaking and entering when he was in his early teens. It was
while he was incarcerated that he had a life changing experience. “When I was in my cell one night,” says Young, “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…” “Soon
after his release from prison, Young saw a book on contemporary murals,
including Southside Chicago’s famous Wall of Respect, a the
collaborative outdoor painting that portrayed prominent African-American
political leaders and cultural heroes. Inspired, he produced a makeshift
mural of his own during the early 1970s – Goodbread Alley, composed of
several hundred panels nailed to dilapidated buildings in Overtown. It
was the first work to bring him to the public’s attention. Since then,
of course, he has been exhibiting tirelessly, holding exhibitions in
galleries, museums and libraries around the country and gaining
recognition as an important artist.” Raw
Vision The public library system
has been a constant resource for Young. “… he’s educated himself,” states Barbara Young, Miami Art Reference
Librarian. In the Overtown Library - which he would one day adorn with
his own murals - he discovered Rembrandt and 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. One
of the characteristics he shares with many outsider artists, Young’s
creative output is prodigious. Two
years after a collector bought the entire contents of his studio, the
space has 4 new rows that run the length of the huge warehouse piled 8
feet tall with paintings, and innumerable boxes of smaller works. All
the work is nearly identical. Young is not driven to refine his images
but to do spill them out as soon as he can. “In
spite of the similarities between Young and some mainstream artists, to
pretend that there are not certain irreducible differences between them
would obfuscate the reasons why Young is so often categorized with
outsider artists. First of all, Young is self-taught. He began drawing
and painting in prison while serving out a sentence for armed robbery in
the late 1960s. Second, although Young has spent endless hours looking
through art history books, he is oblivious to and uninterested in the
shifts and trends that have dominated art discourse in the last forty
years. Unlike artists who engage in intricately conceptual practices,
Young works in a much more intuitive fashion, churning out paintings
while remaining unconcerned in any strict way with formal questions or
conceptual speculations. There is a poignant simplicity to his work
that, while never just simple, disassociates him from academically
trained artists. He’s rooted too deep in the immediate realities of
his community to bother with the concerns that engage artists working in
ways that are loosely tied to any one place or way of life. That he is
unaware and uninterested in contemporary art world discourse is
intimately tied with the fact that he rarely leaves his neighborhood and
is concerned mostly with the life that takes place in it.” Raw Vision “I
paint what I sees…I paint the problems of the world,” says Young. “The darker side of everyday life registers in the
work through these discarded materials. The weathered support becomes a
metaphor for the deplorable and frustrating material realities that
disenfranchisement fosters. There is celebration here, but it is taking
place amid decay. This party may have something to do with hope, but may
as well have to do with momentary escape, something that on another
occasion may be channeled through violence rather than dance.
Joy, rapture, release, and escape are all terms that become
important, even if their value is always on the verge of becoming
equivocal.” Raw Vision Review The
dialogue between the sophisticated content and the trashed materials
illustrate the dichotomy of Young’s creativity:
An outsider urban expressionist, he is a category unto himself.
Young is no less an empathetically gifted contemporary artist than the
obsessed and compulsive outsider artist of Overtown. “People know
he’s the real thing,” says Miami collector Cristina Santeiro. Currently
recovering from a kidney transplant, Mr. Young will keep painting his
Sisyphean hope for this world. “I
want people to know that I wish there would be peace in the world, and I
will paint the way I paint until there is, and then one day maybe I
could just hang up my brush and not paint no more.” _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Watch this space for new work by this artist _______________________________________________________________________________________ RESOURCES Smithsonian Contemporary Folk Art Intuit Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art ______________________________________________________________________________________
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Seaside FL 850-231-2133 ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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