Purvis Young.
Double-Sided Work, Horses and People.
c. Good Bread Alley Era.
Paint on found heavy board with carpet frame remnants.
Excellent environmental found condition.
Strong imagery.
48" w x 30" h.
Est. $3,000-5,000.
Ship: $350

This double-sided, free-standing work is an intriguing and important example of Purvis Young's work.
It powerfully depicts the themes of struggle and redemption, which are so central to Young's art and worldview. Like much of Young's painting, it chronicles both the adversities and hopes of black modernity, depicting in expressive gestural strokes the raging, anguished battle of the human spirit for liberation and salvation amidst the world's hardships and cruelties.

In his drawings and paintings, Young captured visions of his surroundings in Miami's Overtown neighborhood, a once-thriving African American community that was decimated and turned destitute by the inequities of urban expansion in the 1960s. It was there, in the early 1970s, that Young created his first significant work—an installation of hundreds of paintings that transformed a derelict stretch of abandoned, boarded-up buildings known as "Goodbread Alley" into a vibrant chronicle of black life. Among his frequent subjects were street scenes stacked with tumbling buildings, lined with railroad tracks, and filled with restless crowds of people. Later, the human figures in his dynamic works became mere squiggles of black pigment, writhing hieroglyphs that raise their twisted arms in celebration and praise, rage and anguish.

To capture the metaphysics of oppression and resistance, Young soon added a repertoire of other symbolic images to his urban landscapes. Among these were renderings of wild horses, strangely incongruous to his inner-city world, that represented the human quest for freedom. This painting features these metaphoric animal characters. On one side of the work, two black horses plunge and rear within a fiery field of black agitated figures. In contrast to such fury, the painting on the other side portrays a more peaceful realm in which glowing white horses and human ciphers mingle with other luminous creatures of the light. Painted in a row along the bottom are the floating heads of haloed warrior angels and cloaked sages that served as Young's symbols of human aspiration and goodness. Attached just below these figures, is a 2 x 4 stretch of wood painted with a delicate fluttering of angels and enlightened souls whose arms reach up to the heavens.

A literal depiction of the dichotomy between freedom and oppression, good and evil, this two-sided piece is a powerful portrayal of Young's view on the paradoxes of human experience and possibility. Like many of the other pieces that the artist himself considered to be particularly noteworthy, Young auspiciously "framed" this painting on both sides with strips of old carpet. Within the western tradition of art, such "framing" signals an image's special status as "Art," establishing its literal separation from the mundane, everyday world.
But the shabby carpet materials that Young used to create his frame give this practice an extra ironic twist.
Within black expressive parlance, carpet has often symbolized the downtrodden within society's racist social hierarchy, the plight of being brutally "stepped upon." Like the scraps of wood that served as his canvas, Young 's salvaged carpet was gathered from the streets and derelict buildings of his Goodbread Alley neighborhood. Turning such scorned and dejected materials into art, he used them to signify the struggles and deprivations of his subjects, as well as his dream for the salvation and betterment of humanity.

Underlying all of Young's work was his desire to paint the truth of our social world. He railed at the falsehoods and hypocrisy of mainstream history, seeking out other accounts through books and documentaries, as well as within the unheralded lives of those that surrounded him. He salvaged the stories of the dispossessed, much as he did the discarded plywood, crates, doors, cardboard, broken mirrors, and metal objects upon which he painted. He turned these tales into moving commentaries on humanity with the desire that it might lead to our enlightenment. "I wish there'd be peace," Young explained, "I tried to see where man could get along, to put honey in the sky where it could drip and make the world sweet."

Written by Joanne Cubbs, with excerpts from her essay, "Voices from the Black South," in Great and Mighty Things: Outsider Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection, Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art, in association with Yale University Press, 2013.)Young's works are to be found in numerous major museum collections such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in D.C. , the High Museum in Atlanta, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Recent exhibitions include "History Refused to Die: Highlights from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation Gift" at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2018), and "Revelations: Art from the African American South" at the de Young Museum in San Francisco (2018), whose catalog features Young's work on the cover.
This year Young's art will be included in the GAA Foundation's exhibition at the Venice Biennale, a huge signifier of art-world success.
Just as notably, a major example of his work was also recently acquired by the prestigious Morgan Library and Museum, renowned for its drawing collection and for its holdings of first editions of Harlem Renaissance writers such as Langston Hughes.