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Purvis Young

1943 - 2010

Purvis Young’s murals appeared on boarded storefronts and on fence barriers in Miami’s Overtown ghetto during the late 1960s. He scrawled images of wild horses, floating angel heads, soldiers, and musicians. His cityscapes depicted revelers and protestors, hovering insects and pregnant women balancing padlocks on their heads. Like a cryptographer codifying his world, Young created imageries of dreams while he encapsulated a time and a place.
Young created obsessively painting figures that have sprung from his sensitivity to his environment on scrap wood. Young’s observations described and clarified his understanding of life in the mean streets. While trying to decipher Young’s visual daydreaming, a viewer is challenged to determine how something so abstract can feel so real, how something so tenuous can ring so true, and how something so anti-aesthetic can be so beautiful.

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