Florida is known as a place for artistic expression. The buoyant nature has inspired a magnificent variety of artists from all walks of life, creating works depicting both Florida landscape and lifestyle.
An example would be early sketch artists drawing Florida’s Indigenous tribes; including clothing, hunting and gathering techniques they used, along with the tools created from the environment.
Aside from indigenous people, there were explorers, pioneers from other southern states claiming territory, and more. Steamboats and railroads were also depicted artistically before the advent of photography, and encroachment of land by mass industrialization.
There are many big cities in Florida with urban culture and street life, often referred to as “Florida’s underbelly,” where the flora and fauna of Florida stops, and the concrete jungle begins. In these cities, paradise is long forgotten.
From out of the grit, Purvis Young was an unlikely artistic urban hero of the people in regard to his depiction of what he saw on the streets of Overtown Miami.
He painted a rising up from oppression through his own brand of urban abstract art; a unique style that makes Purvis Young one of the most prolific and gifted contemporary artists of his generation. He’s not viewed as just a Florida artist per se, but an artist with a message, like artist Jean-Michel Basquiat from New York. His message was that of oppression.
Before Basquiat became famous, he was living on the streets and painting on the concrete walls of New York City; his unique written word art and tags often identifying Basquiat to his work. Basquiat gained pop culture fame, yet the struggle he depicted remained fluid throughout, because he remembered where he came from, and what it was all about. He also struggled with racism after he was famous.
While Basquiat was in New York doing his fame thing, hanging out with the likes of Andy Warhol and other pop artists, Young was painting scenes on the streets of Miami, sweating in the oppressive Florida heat, art studios with little to no air conditioning adding to the elemental and organic angst of the work. Young used his experience as a discriminated against black man in his artwork, yet he also incorporated elements and symbolism truly unique to Florida.
It wasn't unusual to see a man on a horse trotting down the sidewalk into Overtown, the city part of town, having come from the outskirts, where the old Florida was miles away from Young's own urban experiences.
Young also put reactive qualities into his characters in regard to how other's viewed him, hence the discriminatory aspect, with the depiction and clashing of the two. He showed the unfairness of being prejudged by society and authority, his sense of morality, history of the black races; not just from a South Florida perspective, but from roots in slavery.
Young started in a dinky warehouse, and was painting urban masterpieces throughout town and on huge canvases as he developed. Like the celebrated folk artists throughout the decades in Florida, he would often make large frames from scrap wood. After fastening the wood together, he stretched large rolled canvas over the wood. He had no limits to the size of the piece he was painting, and could depict stories through his art with room for mass symbolism as a message, through determination and feverish intent.
He sometimes gave his work away until he was discovered, and relocated to a clean, big studio after achieving monetary success. Now his work, the massive paintings that he once gave away for free, fetch upwards of thirty-five thousand dollars.
There is a museum in Florida dedicated to the artist in Ft. Lauderdale: The Purvis Young Museum, at 725 Progresso Drive.
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