Rising Fawn Folk Art Presents
Purvis Young

 See His Works 

Purvis Young was born February 2, 1943, in Miami, and has spent his entire life in the city's black ghetto, Overtown. He drew and painted as a child, and began painting again while in prison to help pass the time.

Purvis was first recognized as an artist in the early 1970s when the media was attracted to a row of murals he painted on abandoned buildings in "Good Bread Alley". His works demanded that passerbys take notice, and he discovered he could express himself through his art and be heard.

Young produces public and private works, finding both subject matter and materials in the streets of Overtown. For his compositions, he gathers materials from construction sites -- plywood, nails, glass and wood. He also uses old books, waste paper, scraps of cardboard, wood and Masonite board, broken doors and mirrors as canvas for his paintings, leaving them the way he finds them. These recycled materials, supported by homemade frames, become personal connections to the humanity Young paints. They serve to underscore his concern for his community, its economic reality, and humankind in general. His paintings are unique and somewhat abstract in that each brushstroke seems to reduce life's complexities to the barest essentials.

Young's work has been displayed in museums and galleries in Florida, Louisiana, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and as far away as Paris and Cologne. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. In May of 1998 he was one of three living artists that were honored in the exhibition entitled "Self-Taught Artists of the 20th Century."

Says Purvis Young, "Sometimes I say, if they can't read it, well...... But the message is: in all the poverty, the crime, the pushin' drugs, there is love. There is help. There is change."