Urban expressionist: three area shows highlight a 35-year outpouring of exuberant, justice-haunted paintings and assemblages by the self-taught artist Purvis Young - Report From Miami

Purvis Young, whose 60th birthday has been marked with several local exhibitions, has lived all of his years in the shabby, lively streets of Overtown, a black neighborhood on the margin of downtown Miami and its opulent cluster of gleaming glass towers. He makes expressive, figurative paintings and assemblages that are passionately engaged with the political, social and emotional environment of his community.

For the past three decades, Purvis, as everyone here calls him, has challenged Miami's indifference to Overtown's dismal fate with the literally thousands of images he has poured out on local fences, walls, plywood panels, lengths of vinyl, discarded doors, scrap wood, scavenged pieces of glass and other eye-catching trash including old dresser drawers, drum lids and metal shelving. He has developed a personal iconography: black figures with arms reaching up, aspiring, struggling; funeral processions and parades; trucks that carry goods to places other than Overtown; buildings pressing in; rounded blue shapes looming above that symbolize the surveilling "eyes" of the white system; dark, wild horses that promise freedom; trains that promise travel and escape.

The large heads and faces that float above his crowds stand for the "good people," the "angels" that Young identifies with, who bring hope, be they Bishop Tutu or Miles Davis. Young has a lively sense of gesture and motion; his painterly rhythms are rapid and syncopated, forming a dancing pattern. His drawing is quick and fluid. His color has intensified as, over time, he was able to afford oils in addition to house paint. The general effect of a mass of his work seen together is of a fierce energy edging toward ecstasy.

He continues to produce a nonstop torrent of new paintings and constructions, some of which were shown recently at the Fredric Snitzer Gallery in Miami. His work was also included in a recent exhibition celebrating the 16th anniversary of the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale (where he is deemed an "urban outsider"). And at the Bass Museum in Miami Beach, an illuminating retrospective, judiciously chosen by curator Ruth Grim, took as its title his own simple explanation of the subject of his work: "The Life I See."

Young didn't wait for his work to be exhibited in art galleries or museums, although that's where it is now. He began to paint to save his own life. He tells of drawing spontaneously as a child, encouraged by his Bahamian mother. Then at 18, arrested for armed robbery, he served four years of hard time at Raiford State Prison in Florida. He started to draw again in jail. When he was released, back on the streets of the ghetto, without much formal education, seeking to salvage his life, he found a saving grace in art. "One day when I was about 25 or so I looked in a book and saw how they painted those buildings up north--the Wall of Respect, you know. In Chicago and Detroit these guys painted murals on buildings and I said: Man, I ain't gonna stand on no street corner all day, I'm gonna paint!" (1)

Purvis was galvanized by the popular mural movement that emerged in the late '60s in black, Chicano, Latino and other ethnic urban neighborhoods. He saw that ordinary people could paint the stories of their own communities and give them mythic importance. And looking through art books at the public library, he discovered "guys painting their feelings," and studied his favorites, Rembrandt, El Greco, Daumier, van Gogh.

His own first public project appeared in the early '70s. It consisted of hundreds of pictures painted with house paint on plywood he affixed to boarded-up buildings along a stretch of Fourteenth Street in Overtown known as Goodbread Alley. The name referred to a bakery that was destroyed, like many other businesses and homes, by the routing of an elevated expressway, I-395, through the heart of the neighborhood. Don Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist then with the nearby Miami News, remembers the sight with awe and admiration. "My god, there were so many of them. He was raging at all of us." (2)

Anger at injustice possessed Purvis; he absorbed the emotions of the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War marches and found that in making art he could contain and channel his fury and compassion. About his Goodbread Alley project, he later said, "My feeling was the world might get better if I put up my protests. 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." (3)

Purvis Young has been working in Miami for more than 30 years; his reputation has grown slowly and organically. In the early '70s, the time of Goodbread Alley, his energy and authenticity attracted alert local collectors like Richard Levine. Some institutions also played a role in acquainting the community with his work. Barbara Young (no relation), in charge of the art section of the Dade County Public Library, observed Purvis poring over the art books and drawing his own pictures; she gave him the opportunity to paint a mural on the outside walls of the Overtown Branch Library (now destroyed). In the 1980s he received a commission from the Dade County Art in Public Places Trust to install a work in one of the Metro stations. Miami reporters and critics took note of this unique native son, and a series of local dealers sold his work and introduced him to the wider world. Young benefited from the surge of interest in outsider art in the '80s and '90s: his work began to be included in group exhibitions and books. In the late '90s, Mira and Don Rubell, Miami-based collectors of blue-chip contemporary art, bought several thousand paintings and drawings--the entire contents of his studio-warehouse at that time. They are convinced he should be judged not as an "outsider," but as an artist who contributes to the diversity of individual styles and statements in contemporary art. Since then, Young has filled his studio again.