Never-Nervous-Purvis. A conversation with one of Miami's best known artists.
Written by Steve Mayo
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In February, shortly after Young’s 64th birthday, his attorney filed suit against Siskind for failing to record sales, turn over profits to the artist and locking Young out of his own studio. In a counter-suit Siskind is seeking to have Young declared mentally incompetent and seeking ownership of half of Young’s work.
SM: Do you feel like you’re life has been one led free?
PY: Yeah. I see a whole lot of things going on in America. I see the way certain people come from other countries and they give them the rights to stay. I see some people come from other islands they’re denied of their rights. I see all kinda shit.
Young admits he’s no angel. He spent three-years in prison for breaking and entering. However, the same way the angels represent hope in his art, it was art that gave him hope. As a 7 or 8 year-old boy, he remembers watching his Uncle Irving paint but it wasn’t until prison that he started painting. “My uncle was a painter. He didn’t tell me nothing about it. I just watched him paint. I was a young boy. I couldn’t catch on to what he was doing. But when I was in the penitentiary I taught myself to paint. I just wanted to paint and express my feelings.”
And it was not long after repaying his debt to society that he started hanging his paintings on the outside wall of an abandoned building in Goodbread Alley, a stretch of 14th Avenue in Overtown named for a bakery. Young’s work has journeyed from that alley, where collectors and the media found it, to galleries and museums throughout South Florida and the rest of the country.
“I got the idea from the wall of respect in Chicago, ”Young recalls about the project. “I just wanted to express my feelings.” He did and still does, but he has also studied other masters along the way, whose work has helped guide Young’s.
While the details of Young’s life tend to build much of the mystic around the artist and even a documentary released last year, Purvis of Overtown, Marvin Holloway, a collector who has collected art by African American artists since the late 1960s, including Young’s work, contends that rarely is Young’s artistic ability regarded with the same amazement. “They leave out the work, ”Holloway says. “People focus on Purvis the individual. Even the so-called professionals don’t spend a lot of time talking about the work’s aesthetics and the compelling character of the work or his technique. What people do, because they don’t know what to do with his work, is they call him an outsider. And that doesn’t make sense because he’s in the Smithsonian, the Bass, Miami Art Museum. At museum after museum across the country you’ll find Purvis Young. He’s in the institutions where insiders are legitimized and art history defined. The begging questions, as prolific as he is, where will he go from there?”
