DIMENSIONS: H: 26 W. CONDITION: Good condition with wear and age as pictured. Purvis Young was a self-taught African-American artist known for his expressive collages and paintings. Made on found objects, including scrap metal, book pages, and discarded envelopes, his richly colored depictions of trucks, figures, and coil-shaped abstractions, described a fraught yet inspired experience of living in the poverty stricken Overtown neighborhood of Miami. “What I say is the world is getting worser, guys pushing buggies, street people not having no jobs here in Miami, drugs kill the young, and church people riding around in luxury cars, ” he once remarked. Born on February 4, 1943 in Liberty City, FL, he learned to draw from his uncle at a young age but never had any formal art training. Years after his release, Young’s creative output attracted the attention of Bernard Davis, the owner of the Miami Art Museum. Davis subsequently brought the artist’s work into the public eye, and by the 1970s, tourists and collectors regularly visited Young in Goodbread Alley where he lived and worked. Inspired by books on Rembrandt, Vincent van Gogh, El Greco, and Paul Gauguin, as well as documentaries on American history, Young’s work grew in scope and formal invention throughout the latter part of his career. The artist died on April 20, 2010 in Miami, FL. Today, his works are held in the collections of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the American Folk Art Museum in New York, and the de Young Museum of Art in San Francisco, among others. According to Art in America In interviews, he [Young] often referred to his work as a form of protest art, and among the twenty major paintings at Salon 94 were several that portrayed crowds of people demonstrating in the streets. Each panel in the diptych Untitled (Protesters), ca. 1990s, features a group of schematic figures outlined in black. On the left hand panel, two central figures are shown with their arms raised in the air; depicted below the crowd is a row of tenement buildings. In both panels, the subjects seem to vibrate in ethereal spaces-fiery red on the left and primarily greenish on the right-as is typical in Young’s work.
