3″ and 8″ x 6 (varied edge). Laid on Board H: 15″ x W: 12″. CONDITION: Good condition with wear and age as pictured. Of art by Purvis Young was made on an old. Mimeograph from Mount Zion Church, a famous meeting place in Miami. One of the mimeographs is dated 1955. Part of the “Basketball Series” of works acquired from the Joy Moos Collection. Moos label on back. The owner’s collection of Basketball Series works includes five unique works of art that are all similar in design with colorful action images. All of the works are produced on old sheets of paper that Purvis Young would have found scavenging through disposal from local institutions. Most of the works in the Basketball Series came from paper associated with Mount Zion Baptist Church in Miami (see photograph). Although this particular work is marked as circa 1990 from Joy Moos Gallery, all of the works are on paper that have dating back to the 1950’s and 1960’s. Joy Moos Gallery As Reported in the Washington Post, January 8, 2020. In 1989, Miami art dealer Joy Moos signed Purvis Young to an exclusive contract. She introduced his work to contemporary art galleries in New York and Chicago. Moos indicated she took Purvis Young to the dentist and helped him open his first bank account. In some ways, she said, it was like taking a child. A Cuban Santeria priest named Silo Crespo acted as Young’s manager. She hired a priestess to remove them: I had to have the gallery cleaned. I had to do all this voodoo stuff with a cut chicken head. Leon Rolle, then a practicing lawyer, said Young asked him for help ending his contract with Moos so the artist could be free to negotiate with Gerard C. “William” Louis-Dreyfus – billionaire energy mogul, father of actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus and collector of self-taught artists. But the collector was worried about oversupply and wanted Young to destroy a third of his inventory. Rolle said Young rejected the deal, griping, They never told Shakespeare he wrote too much! Both Crespo and Louis-Dreyfus have since died. Jeffrey Gilman, president of the William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation, doubted the billionaire would have wanted art destroyed: He couldn’t even bring himself to sell anything! Moos said Rolle and Crespo had unrealistic expectations of the value of Young’s work and didn’t understand the market. Mount Zion Baptist Church, Miami, Florida. Excerpt from the Miami Affordability Project Historic Properties Dataset, prepared by UM Office of Civic and Community Engagement. Construction of the present church building began in 1928 and took thirteen years to complete. Evans, one of the most prominent religious leaders of Overtown, oversaw construction. Zion is one of the few examples of Mediterranean Revival style architecture in Overtown. As with many other historical properties in this area, its design is also significant because of the ways planners adapted this style to the local environment by incorporating high ceilings and porches. The church was significantly impacted by the construction of Interstate 95 in the 1960s, when a portion of the church was acquired to build an entrance ramp. The congregation of Mt. Zion Baptist Church remains an active part of the community today. The Church was one of the first meeting places for the Boys and Girls Scouts as well as civil rights movement leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 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.
