Purvis Young was an American artist of Bahamian descent.
20 Facts About Purvis Young
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Purvis Young's work is found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Perez Art Museum Miami, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and others.
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Purvis Young was born in Liberty City, a neighborhood of Miami, Florida, on February 2,1943.
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Purvis Young proceeded to move into the Overtown neighborhood of Miami.
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Purvis Young became attracted to a vacant alley called Goodbread Alley, which was named after the Jamaican bakeries that once occupied the street; he started living there in 1971.
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Purvis Young had never painted before, but inspiration struck and he began to create paintings and nailing them to the boarded up storefronts that formed the alley.
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Purvis Young painted on wood he found on the streets and occasionally paintings would "disappear" from the wall, but Young didn't mind.
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Occasionally, Purvis Young sold paintings to visitors - tourists and collectors alike - right off the wall.
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Davis became a patron of Purvis Young, providing him with painting supplies as well.
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In 2008 the Rubells donated 108 works to Morehouse College In January 2007, Purvis Young was selected as the Art Miami Fair's Director's Choice Exhibition, sponsored by Grace Cafe and Galleries and the Bergman Collection, at the Miami Beach Convention Center.
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Purvis Young helped to establish a number of outdoor art fairs in South Florida that continue today.
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Siskind stated that he and Purvis Young had settled the suit amicably and that Purvis Young retained ownership of 1,000 paintings and was financially stable.
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Purvis Young suffered from diabetes, and toward the latter years of his life, he had other health problems, undergoing a kidney transplant in 2007.
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Purvis Young died on April 20,2010 in Miami from cardiac arrest and pulmonary edema.
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Purvis Young is survived by his two sisters Betty Rodriguez and Shirley Byrd, and his brother Irvin Byrd.
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Purvis Young found strong influence in Western art history and voraciously absorbed books from his nearby public library by Rembrandt, Vincent van Gogh, Gauguin, El Greco, Daumier and Picasso.
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Purvis Young's work was vibrant and colorful, and was described as appearing like fingerpainting.
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Purvis Young is credited with influencing the art movement terms social expressionism or urban expressionism.
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Two Purvis Young works appear on the 2018 David Byrne album American Utopia.
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Just as written language as communicated through a very condensed system of letters, Purvis Young tells his stories through paint to become the unofficial storyteller.