Mixed media on paper 11 x 7 in., 19 x 16 in. (framed). The work of the urban black vernacular artist, Purvis Young, has roots in the dreamy fields of high art subject matter-evoking Picasso in its riders, its elegant horses, its nudes. At the same time it is filled with the energy and syncretism of the world's vanguard-American urban Black culture. It is to "outsider art" what be bop is to the blues. The subject matter rides on a thick layer of color, attention, choice, free-swinging composition that refers to a thousand years of composition before it.Young lives and works in Overtown, a neighborhood in Miami cut off by the highway overpasses that loom over it. He is "of the community, but is also, now, of the larger art world as well." He has researched art history avidly and has seen what other artists have done, spending years in the libraries that have supported his work. He has chosen his imagery out of Overtown and his own life, and out of the resonances of the past as well.Young's choices of materials-the discarded boards he uses to paint on and to "frame" works; the fragments of text, the use of books to mount the works-are not made by happenstance, though early on they may have been the fruit of necessity. Now these are elements of meaning. Now they insist on the presence of the street, full of stuff, humanity, words, scraps, full of the exchanges that create the most exciting cultural milieu in the world, creative, tragic, excessive, beautiful, wasteful.- Ann KlefstadSource:Skot Foreman Fine Art, Ltd.Biography from the Archives of askARTBiography photo for Purvis YoungAlthough Purvis Young enjoyed painting as a child it wasn't until after having been imprisoned as a young man, that he took up drawing again. Purvis was inspired by the urban murals of Chicago and Detroit and painting became a way to express his anger and frustration. He wanted to paint the stories of his own neighborhood.His first public art in the early 70s was the Goodbread Alley project. The art consisted of hundreds of pictures hung on boarded up buildings along Fourteenth Street in Overton, his Miami neighborhood. The heart of the neighborhood had been destroyed when I-395 was routed through the community. Through art Purvis Young has continued to channel his anger at the injustices of our society.Purvis Young's style is naive, expressionist and symbolic. He continues to be a prolific painter motivated by the need to express his views of social injustice.Source:Art in America, January 2003

Good condition