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Purvis Young: Paintings From the Street
“Picasso
of the Ghetto” Paints Life in Overtown
By:
Malika Bierstein
BBT Staff Writer
When
Purvis Young first created a mural from house paint and
plywood scraps in 1972 along a stretch of I-95 in Overtown
known as Goodbread Alley, no one yet realized that the cultural
and economic divides he painted would give way to self-expression
and artistic fame, such that would project Young far beyond
the city streets that bore him.
“My feeling was the world might get better if I put
up my protests,” said Young in an excerpt from Souls
Grown Deep, African-American Vernacular Art, in reference
to the Goodbread Alley project. “Even if it didn’t,
it was just something I had to be doing. I make like I’m
a warrior, like God sending an angel to stop war, like in
my art.”
In Purvis Young: Paintings from the Street, a collection
of 100 pieces of his work on display at the Boca Raton Museum
of Art until November 26, it is evident just how much of
Overtown’s cultural traditions, street smarts, struggle
and violence, assimilation and emotional and economic unrest
Young incorporates into his art. He paints what he sees,
capturing on canvas the conditions of the people and city
that surround him and translated quite literally through
the titles of his work: Truck Yard and Train Depot, City
Life, Been Framed, Music with Warriors, Tent City Violence,
Dead Man, Funeral Procession, Carrying the Beloved and Pregnant
Lady with Syringe On Top of the World to name a few.
His paintings exist on everything from plywood to broken
pieces of furniture and other miscellaneous bits of trash.
There is no glitz and glamour, no pretentiousness in the
stark reality of his pieces, much like the artist himself,
who claims he “was put on this earth to paint, not
to live” and seems generally unaffected by the level
of fame thrust upon him, despite the fact that his work
appears in more than 60 public collections, with six exhibitions
this year alone. He still lives and works in the very city
that affected him enough to want to paint it.
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“There
is an aura and an energy that emanates out of his work,”
said Skot Foreman, guest curator for the Boca Museum exhibition
and someone who has been actively handling elements of Young’s
work since the early ’90s. “It’s the roughness
of the medium, the combination of colors, the in-your-face subject
matter [and] the boldness of it. He has taken nothing –
an environment that is so harsh, so negative, so wrought with
violence, prostitution, homelessness – and created something
beautiful. I believe there is magic in that. Overall, there is
something about Purvis that is uniquely Purvis. I haven’t
seen anything like it since.”
After learning about “Freedom Walls” such as The Wall
of Respect in Chicago, The Wall of Dignity in Detroit and The
Wall of Consciousness in Philadelphia, murals done by local artists
without official sponsorship or sanction that represented a rallying
point for the community and a visualization of their collective
values and successes, Young created a mural at the intersection
of N.W. 3rd Avenue and 14th Street, coined Goodbread Alley for
a Bahamian bakery that once operated there. The mural was a collage
of hundreds of paintings done with house paint, which Young affixed
to the sides of the abandoned buildings.
But the Department of Housing and Urban Development condemned
the buildings in 1975, and tore them down to clear the site for
public housing projects. Most of the work was lost or destroyed.
A few of the original pieces remain in the possession of a small
number of Miamians fortunate enough to have saved them. Soon after,
local collectors and dealers took notice of Young, in addition
to a number of tourists who bought his early work and eventually
helped to bring his art out of Overtown and into the wider community.
Young is self-taught and began drawing at the age of 6, but he
didn’t officially begin painting until age 20. Now, 43 years
later, he’s still painting, filling up the studio he runs
on N.E. 17th Street and 2nd Avenue with Martin Siskind, his informal
manager and friend.
Siskind, a former restaurateur, antique dealer and art dealer,
has a rather unsavory reputation in Miami, and has been linked
to a number of alleged scams involving real estate deals, antiques
and artwork. Young himself admitted to an incident in 2002 in
which Frederic Snitzer, a well-known Miami gallery owner representing
him at the time, had to hire a lawyer to retrieve over $10,000
worth of Young’s artwork from Siskind. But he’s put
all of that behind him, stating that he trusts Siskind completely
in his professional and personal affairs.
“[The Snitzer incident] is something I have forgotten,”
he said. “There’s people that wrote things about Martin
trying to keep me away from him – people who bought my art
– but I think he’s great. They don’t have nothing
good to say and they’re the ones I have to watch out for,
you know. A lot of guys know me but never introduced me to any
art dealers. One day I got sick and I asked him [Siskind] to carry
me to a doctor. I was in bad shape with my diabetes and he told
me that if I don’t get on dialysis I’m gonna die,
and ever since I’ve been with him. We’re like friends.
I took an oath that I will not sell to any other art dealer. I
took an oath, I won’t do that, but there is no formal contract
between us. It’s on a personal level.”
Questions, however, have been raised as to the spelling of the
artist’s name. During the exhibition at the Boca Museum,
he autographed catalogues “Pervis Young” instead of
Purvis Young. The latter is the widely known spelling, and the
one used in all materials related to the Boca exhibition. In addition,
www.purvisyoung.com is a website owned by Foreman that contains
Young’s biography along with a history of his work. Siskind
owns a placeholder at www.pervisyoung.com, as the site is currently
under construction. Young credits the misspelling to a simple
error made by banks and different people that he worked with that
was never corrected, though he says Pervis is “the way my
mother spells it.” When asked about the creation of an entire
website around the Purvis spelling, Young said that Foreman had
given him money to produce the site and so he allowed it, though
he admits that he didn’t really know what a website was
when he made the agreement. He just figured it was okay.
Despite all of the politics associated with his name, his fortune,
and his daily health struggles, Purvis remains positive. In the
works are the publication of a catalogue on Purvis by the Rubell
Family Collection which will include a combination of essays and
color photos of his work; an exhibition at the Bass Museum in
Miami Beach sometime next year; a documentary by the director
of Purvis Young Studios, Richard Fendelman; and a possible kidney
transplant.
“I’ve traveled to places like Louisiana and Mississippi
and found out that some people don’t like Purvis Young,
the artist,” said Young, “but I mostly keep to myself.
I can’t solve the world’s problems. I paint the world’s
problems.”
Purvis Young Studios will be open to the public for an exhibition
of his work on December 1, 2006.
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