Outsider artist Purvis Young (1943–2010) was entirely self-taught, painting images of racism and daily violence which plagued his underprivileged neighborhood of Overtown in Miami, Florida. Intensely prolific, he created over hundreds, perhaps even thousands of works.
His work tells a story of everyday struggles while living in an area referred to as “Colored Town” during the Jim Crow era. In all his life, he never left the few square miles of Overtown.
Unlike many of the artists he admired in his later years, Purvis did not have access to a traditional art education. Yet, with no constraints imposed on him from an academy, he was unburdened by typical artistic traditions.
Despite his outsider status, especially later in his career, the artist felt a profound connection and resonance to other artists such as Rembrandt and Gauguin. He maintained an invisible communion with the legacy of artists that came before him. “I just like to read about painters because they have the same problems. Same problems. They look like they see the same thing I see.”
Purvis’s work radiates rawness, indulging in color and shape. They are riddled with unrest and animation. Ultimately, his work is a dialogue of binaries. Freedom versus struggle. White versus black. Country versus city. Movement versus confinement. Truth versus deceit. Rich versus poor.
Ultimately, his body of work reflects his life, including Goodbread Alley, where he first started showing his paintings, to his prison cell where he remained for three years after being arrested for breaking and entering.
Despite his self-imposed confinement to his small neighborhood, he understood the plight of a nation of black people and their means of escape. “Blacks couldn't ride except on the back of the train, couldn't live but on one side of the tracks. But now the trains have come to mean freedom.”
Forty years later, MoCA Westport has taken Purvis’s work out of its environment. Out of the Alley, out of Overtown, but not necessarily out of context. “Everything in my paintings, just about, come from the neighborhood. I used to see everything that go on in the Alley. The Alley ain't there now, but what go on now be about the same, man, every day.”
Indeed, it resonates in our contemporary moment, exceeding its humble origins; a record of his experiences that transcend time and place.
The exhibition, from the collection of Lynne and Jack Dodick, features 36 never-seen-before paintings by the artist, showing his distinctive visual style and use of paint and everyday discarded found objects such as scrap lumber and plywood.
Says Lynne, “Actually, our collection and some of the things that we have collected as outsider art is very in vogue now. We were not in it as an investment, we were in it for the pleasure of seeing it and appreciating what the artists had done.”
Exhibit runs from September 15 - December 29, 2023
Visit MoCAWestport.org to learn more about the exhibition and supporting programming.
