"All that wood caused problems," explains Young, tall and burly, dressed in blue work pants, a matching shirt, and surf sandals. Dried paint stains his hands and dots his short nappy hair. "I scrape my legs a few times. Then I worry about a fire or something. I tell the guys who I know that somebody was going to walk in here and make me an offer. I was looking for a ballplayer."
Relief came not from a major-leaguer, but from Don and Mera Rubell, big-league collectors in the field of contemporary art who relocated their accumulated works here from New York in December 1994. The Rubells have been acquiring contemporary art since the Seventies, and are known for investing in work by rising young artists.
In early March, after just one visit to Young's warehouse studio/home, the couple purchased every one of the thousands of paintings in sight. The Rubells will not know exactly how many works they bought until the collection is sorted and catalogued, but one of the employees who moved the pieces from Young's studio to the Rubell Family Collection exhibition space and storage facility at 95 NW 29th St, estimates there are 4000 to 5000 paintings in all, the majority of them large works on wood, measuring up to eight-by-four feet. They have been fumigated and are being stored in several freight containers on the Rubells' property.
Art dealer Tamara Hendershot and FIU professor and poet Jeffrey Knapp, a friend of Young, introduced the artist to the Rubells and acted as intermediaries in the deal. No one involved with the sale will disclose the artist's asking price (which the Rubells say they agreed to pay) for the work, but sources in the local art community, which has been abuzz with the news, have made some wildly varying guesses, anywhere from $60,000 to more than a million dollars. The money will be paid in installments, providing the 56-year-old painter with a stipend, possibly for the rest of his life. "I can travel," a contented Young says of the windfall. "If I die I can bury myself. I can start over again. Now I've got room to move around."
While the artist seems most pleased with the immediate results of the removal of his paintings from the studio and his newfound financial security, what's important for the Rubells is the long-term outcome of their impulsive decision to buy the work. Sorting through the paintings and evaluating the artistic significance of each will be an extensive and costly task for which the Rubells plan to enlist art professionals familiar with Young. They want to document the artist's oeuvre and exhibit it, and are contemplating buying another building in order to put it on permanent display, as well as showing it with the work of other artists in their collection. They stress that they will not resell the paintings, but ultimately plan to donate many of them to museums.
"The fantasy would be that all of our perceptions about this work are as clear as we think now," Mera Rubell says. "Which is maybe we really have a great American artist who's been working right inside this neighborhood. How beautiful would that be. That would be an incredible thing."
Although Purvis Young has yet to receive the kind of art-world sanctification Rubell cautiously anticipates, both the man and his work have been visible and enduring elements of Miami's visual landscape for some 30 years. Young has often painted outdoors in his Overtown neighborhood, and his bold renderings of writhing urban crowds, proud black angels, wild horses, pick-up basketball games, Haitian boat people, funeral processions, majestic pregnant women, riots, and war are as familiar to inner-city residents and passing drivers as they are to art mavens who frequent the local museums and galleries that have exhibited his work. Young's sublime scenes of bleak reality and enduring hope offer a gritty counterimage to the stereotypical promotional picture of Miami as a carefree tropical paradise.
"Purvis is an institution in Miami," says Diane Camber, director of Miami Beach's Bass Museum and a long-time fan of the artist. Although a show devoted solely to Young's work has not been displayed at the Bass, he has participated in group exhibitions there. The museum's collection includes several of the artist's small paintings, which Camber says were gifts from Young. "There's hardly anyone in town who knows about Purvis who doesn't have a work or two of his," she observes. "He can see [his work] as something to get money, but by the same token he can be quite generous with it."
Over the years that generosity has been as remarkable as his abundant output. And just as legendary are the stories of art dealers and collectors pulling up their cars (or vans) to the artist's studio and loading up with paintings. "People used to come and take 20 or 30 paintings and give him 50 bucks for all of them," says Young's venerable friend Silo Crespo, a retired furniture restorer and Santeria priest who provided housing for Young and loosely served as his manager in the Seventies and Eighties. "He was robbed."
Young's large, more detailed paintings now routinely sell for between $10,000 and $15,000, sometimes more. The artist himself, however, has never received anything close to those prices for his work. Those types of transactions take place only between dealers and collectors.
In Miami and beyond, gallery owners have had success positioning Young as a popular artist of the "outsider" school, a market that has grown dramatically over the past decade, even while the rest of the art world has been in a slump. Today competition among dealers to represent such artists can be fierce. Like Young, the most acclaimed American outsider artists are from the South, have little or no formal art training, and are often poor and black. Perceived as primitive and childlike, these artists, also known by the gentler term, "self-taught," are eccentric by definition. They can be illiterate, indigent, elderly, incarcerated, or clinically insane; the artists' life stories are often selling points every bit as important as the artworks themselves.
"Purvis is the aborigine of the ghetto," proclaims Larry Clemons, who owns Gallery 721, a Fort Lauderdale shop specializing in Peter Max prints and works by apocalyptic Pop art hawker Rev. Howard Finster. The dealer first approached Young one day in 1995 when the artist was sitting on an Overtown street corner painting scenes of the neighborhood. Clemons says he kept returning until Young let him into his studio.
Later he helped place Young in "Souls Grown Deep," an extensive show that opened in Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics. Clemons also is assisting Atlanta dealer Bill Arnett with the publication of a three-volume catalogue that will include 60 pages on Young.
The Fort Lauderdale dealer considers himself an authority on Young's work. In his small, cheery gallery, he eagerly holds forth on black history and the blues, reads aloud from outsider exhibition catalogues, tells stories about Young in an exaggerated imitation of the artist's Old Florida accent, and authoritatively interprets various Young paintings displayed in the gallery.
"Purvis likes to paint trucks because they bring jobs to Overtown," Clemons says confidently, pointing to a small painting of a rig, which the dealer describes as a symbol of the financial struggle of the black man against the white establishment. (When asked later about the meaning of a similar painting, Young answers simply: "I like trucks.")
Clemons took the artist to Atlanta by train for the "Souls Grown Deep" exhibit, his first trip outside Overtown. Since then Young has made several escorted visits to cities in the United States where his work has been shown. Last spring an art dealer from Tennessee took Young to the Outsider Art Fair in New York, a move that drew criticism from gallery owners at the event.
"[Young] shouldn't have been there," scolds Miami art dealer Joy Moos, whose exclusive contract with Young in the early Nineties ended in litigation. "His social intercourse lasts about twenty minutes. He was sitting there in the booth drawing in a book. Everybody was talking about it."
Moos and others charge that having Young make public appearances where his work is exhibited is akin to putting the artist himself on display. Larry Clemons counters that those critics just want to keep Young in the ghetto. "People take advantage of the uneducated African-American individual, and then when people like myself try to boost their prices and get them more notoriety, they get mad at me," complains the gallery owner, a white Kentucky native. "They say, 'What do you mean you're taking him to Atlanta? Do you think it's good to take him out of his environment?' I'm like, 'Duh. Why don't you move to Overtown and never come out?' Do I think it's good? I think it's necessary." Clemons adds that Young was reluctant to travel to Atlanta until he offered him money to go on the trip.
Clemons maintains that his relationship with Young is not profitable, and that his real interest is "Purvis Young, the man." He invites schoolchildren to the gallery to learn about the artist's work, and helped Young secure a $5000 commission to paint a mural for the House of Blues nightclub in Orlando, from which he claims to have received no commission percentage. Clemons says he has taken Young, a diabetic, to a doctor, and encouraged the artist's girlfriend to stop serving him greasy foods. But when asked what kind of financial agreement he has with the artist, the dealer dodges the question.
"If Purvis ever needs money, he can call me," Clemons says vaguely. When asked if he gives Young 50 percent of the proceeds from sales of paintings (standard practice between dealers and artists), he sounds defensive. "I paid his electric bills until last month. For the past five years he's known he can call me and say, 'I could use some dead presidents,' or 'I'm a little short,' and I'd go down and give him money and he'd give me some work. He knows and I know that I don't need another Purvis Young painting."
Despite Clemons's altruistic claims, this past year he and a partner attempted to sign Young to an exclusive contract. According to a copy of the document examined by New Times, the deal would have paid the artist $60,000 for the thousands of works in his possession, and just 35 percent of sales of any new works. Under the contract Clemons and his partner would have moved Young to a new studio in Broward County, where he would work and live. Clemons would have had the right to enter the space at any time, 24 hours a day. After consulting an attorney, Young declined the offer.
Clemons asserts that the contract had only the artist's best interests in mind. "Anything you can do to take Purvis Young out of Overtown should be done," Clemons says. "He deserves to get away from the depression of the ghetto."
In 1989 Joy Moos did sign Young to a contract, which was renewed in 1991 and was to have remained in effect until 2001. "We never 'discovered' Purvis. He was out there painting," Moos says, explaining that she and her son Howard Davis were the first to successfully market Young's work to upscale collectors. Moos set up Young in a studio near her Design District gallery. Some of his paintings were stored in the gallery, and the dealer kept others in a warehouse to which Young did not have a key.
Moos claims she gave Young 50 percent of all sales she made of his work. But at the time, Young told a Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel reporter he was not getting enough money. Moos would not comment then about his claim to the reporter, and today she says Silo Crespo and other Overtown friends encouraged Young to ask for more than his share. "They told him he should be paid like a baseball player," she recalls.
"She took 3000 or 4000 paintings," Crespo counters. "She made a million dollars. Purvis made maybe $48,000."
Moos maintains that Young was fairly paid. She believes Crespo and his fellow Santeria practitioners were out to get her and that they put the "evil eye" on her son; she says she was forced to hire a priestess to perform a cleansing ritual in her gallery.
The relationship ended after Young allegedly broke into the warehouse to retrieve some of his paintings. In response Moos and her employees cleaned out his studio. Their 1994 contractual dispute was settled out of court. To cover the settlement, Moos sold 700 of the artist's paintings to a Philadelphia gallery and gave half the profits to Young. After the sale she still had hundreds of Young's paintings from the early Nineties. The ones she hasn't sold are stored at her gallery. She proudly says they are the best of his career.
Clemons and Moos are just two of the experienced art dealers or enterprising amateurs who have dealt in Young's work, and profited from it. Another is Skot Foreman, Clemons's former partner. Foreman, who has opened his own gallery in Dania Beach, currently operates a Website offering a selection of Young's work for sale at prices ranging from a few hundred dollars to $19,000. The dealer is also taking offers on a 1967 Datsun automobile Young custom-painted for a Fort Lauderdale exhibition. Young's fans can even order a 30-minute video shot "in the intimate setting of the reclusive artist's warehouse." One of several Internet locations featuring Young's work, Foreman's site (purvisyoung.com), could be misleading to some viewers because nowhere is Foreman's name mentioned; it looks as though the artist himself might be involved. In fact Young is not profiting from any sales made through the Website.
Foreman, however, has no qualms about using Young's name to bring in business, nor does he see any problem with charging $19,000 for a painting the artist may have originally sold for $20. "Those are the vicissitudes of the art world," Foreman reasons.
Young himself doesn't seem to care much what dealers do with his work, as long as they leave him alone. "I run into problems with dealers," he shrugs. "The galleries try to tie me down. I don't want to be tied down." These days he keeps his studio door padlocked at all times. "Sometimes people come to me and they promise me the world. Don't think they don't come to me with all kinds of stories." He laughs heartily. "I'm like Forrest Gump. They don't know I know all about the system." He rests his muscular arm on a large painting in progress. It depicts six snappily dressed dudes standing on a street corner. "I like people to be puzzled about me."
From the steps of his house on NW Fourteenth Terrace, Silo Crespo points a few blocks away, to where the I-395 overpass bisects the neighborhood. He met Purvis Young in 1969 along a stretch of NE Third Avenue popularly known as Goodbread Alley, where the artist created an evolving mural composed of paintings on wood on the outside of a row of boarded-up commercial buildings between Thirteenth and Fourteenth streets.
Like others who walked or drove by, Crespo was struck by the emotional intensity of the paintings, which often showed black figures confined behind bars or wrapped in chains, but always reaching toward the sky. Crespo, a former Cuban merchant seaman who settled in Overtown in the late Sixties, was involved in the civil rights movement in his adopted country, and he was deeply moved by Young's images. He introduced himself to the painter and kept coming back. They conversed while Young, who wore cutoffs and sported a short Afro and sideburns, painted, dipping his brushes into cans of housepaint.
Young was a well-known figure in the neighborhood. He grew up amid a large family in Overtown. His grandparents had come to Miami from the Bahamas and lived in Liberty City, which he remembers as "a fairy tale" place, lush with orange trees. He also recalls his grandmother prohibiting him from playing with his Liberty City cousins. "She didn't like the lifestyle of my mother," Young says. "My mother wanted to come over to Overtown and run with the crowd. My grandmother wanted her kids to be educated."
He attended Booker T. Washington High School, but dropped out in the tenth grade. Young always liked to draw, and says his first artistic influence came from an uncle who periodically stayed with the family. "My uncle was an artist. He was a weary dude," he says, employing a term (perhaps meaning weird) he often uses to describe other artists. "He tried to turn old wood into new wood. He liked to paint birds. I don't know what caused him to go mental. The police would come and get him and rassle him down." In 1961, when he was eighteen years old, Young was arrested for armed robbery. He spent four years in Raiford state penitentiary, where, he has said, a vocational instructor encouraged him to draw. After he returned to Overtown, he decided to become an artist.
"One day when I was 25 or so I looked in a book and saw how they painted those buildings up North -- the Wall of Respect, you know," he told University of Miami art history professor Paula Harper, former art critic for the Miami News, in an early interview. "In Chicago and Detroit these guys painted murals on buildings, and I said, 'I ain't gonna stand on no street corner all day, I'm going to paint!'" The spectacular images along Goodbread Alley quickly attracted attention. People stopped and bought the paintings he made on wood scraps. Young's customers paid ten or twenty dollars for each.
Like Silo Crespo, Bernard Davis, who ran the Miami Museum of Modern Art in a house near Biscayne Bay, stopped and introduced himself. He put together an exhibition of Young's work in 1972. Not long after that the buildings of Goodbread Alley were razed to make way for a housing project. Some of the work affixed to the structures was removed and sold, some of it was scavenged by passersby, and much of it was simply lost.
Crespo recalls that Young had been living in one of the storefronts. "I said, 'Don't worry, Purvis, you can stay with me,'" says Crespo, who took some of the Goodbread Alley works to his home.
On a recent morning, Crespo, dressed all in white, sits on a bench in the sunny front room of a cottage adjoining his house, where Young also once resided. A large picture of an Afro-Cuban deity painted by a Cuban artist hangs above an altar adorned with candles. A painting of an American Indian chief and several other works by Young decorate the rest of the walls; a large stack of his drawings is piled on the floor. These are from the Sixties and Seventies, and include realistic sketches by the young artist: a portrait of his mother, girls in bikinis, nudes.
Young educated himself about art at the main branch of the public library, then located within walking distance of Overtown in what is now Bayfront Park on Biscayne Bay. He studied books on Rembrandt, Rubens, and other old masters. They have remained his biggest influences, along with programs on public television and life on the street. Through the library Young also became involved in Miami's nascent contemporary art scene in the early Eighties.
"He was always special; he was so focused," remembers library art services director Barbara Young (no relation), who ran the library's artmobile at the time. "He always knew absolutely that he was an artist. He knew what it was all about."
She recalls that Young would bring drawings and paintings to the library and leave them there. Soon library curator Margarita Cano organized a show of his work. He covered the walls of one room with paintings as he had done along Goodbread Alley.
The library also displayed Young's works that he created by gluing his drawings to the pages of discarded art history volumes, school texts, and store catalogues. Various examples remain in the library's art collection. Barbara Young says they paid about $200 for them at the time. Other works the artist lent to the library but never retrieved also remain in the collection. In 1984 Young painted a mural on the façade of the new Culmer/Overtown branch library.
In 1986 the painter was commissioned by the Metro-Dade Art in Public Places program to create a mural at the Northside Metrorail station. In the painting he featured images of the workers who constructed the city's transit system. Cesar Trasobares, former director of the Art in Public Places program, also successfully applied for a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts on Young's behalf. Trasobares recalls that the artist spent most of the coveted arts money he received on used bicycles.
"Purvis is always the same. He don't change," says Silo Crespo, paging through one of Young's old books with pride. Although he and Young are not as close as they once were, Crespo's house, scattered with his grandchildren's strollers and toys, still looks like a shrine to Young's work. Paintings are hung on the walls, drawings sit on the bookshelf and on top of the television. Other works are stored under lock and key.
Crespo understands why Young's work has not been as appreciated by his Overtown neighbors as it has been by strangers. "The struggle here is great," he explains. "Sometimes you lose your sensibility for things like art."
But he can't fathom why officials in the City of Miami haven't paid more attention. "Why over here don't they give him something to recognize him?" he asks. "The people who give out the medals and stuff could do something. But in Overtown everything is negative."
Crespo, who is 67 years old, has sold some of Young's works over the years, but says he was never very successful at promoting it. "A guy with a fancy gallery can come here and buy something for $1000 and sell it for $10,000," he says. "It's not the same that Silo Crespo tries to sell something." He says he now has no interest in selling anything, though he hopes the Smithsonian Institution will accept most of his collection of Young's work. Crespo looks at his favorite, a large painting depicting the crying face of a hovering Jesus Christ over pastoral hills covered with inner-city buildings. He smiles and shakes his head. "A person like Purvis don't come twice in this world."
On a recent Saturday morning, Tamara Hendershot and Jeffrey Knapp accompanied Young on his first visit to the Rubell's collection. The Overtown artist toured the two-story building, a onetime Drug Enforcement Administration storage facility where a selection of the Rubells' paintings, sculpture, photographs, and installations are airily displayed. Studying a roomful of disturbingly violent drawings Keith Haring made shortly before his death from AIDS, Young declared the New York artist to be "a weary dude." He quietly observed most of the pieces, ranging from a bathtub full of lard by Janine Antoni to a wall of raw cotton by Leonardo Drew to monumental paintings by Eighties art celebrities Julian Schnabel and David Salle.
"Sometimes it looks different from my art, but I don't criticize," Young says later. "I learn from other artists. It's like sometimes you hear a jazz piece and it don't sound good until you keep hearing it. I think art's like that, too."
Young is older than most artists included in the Rubells' collection, and his paintings lack the calculated aesthetic artifice found in the work of highly educated, savvy conceptualists who question media archetypes or critique the workings of the art world. "It takes all kinds," sums up Young.
Excited about their new acquisitions, the Rubells have placed a half-dozen of Young's large paintings on display. Propped up against the wall behind the reception desk in the building's entranceway, the sketchy expressionist images with their rough wooden frames look modest next to the other slickly finished pieces on exhibit. But the Rubells believe Young's works conform to the collection and will hold their own once they are properly hung.
Mera Rubell points out obvious thematic connections to the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat and several other black artists in the collection, and she sees no reason to classify Young as an outsider artist. "The whole notion of other in art is disturbing to us," she says. "Outsider is a word that classifies a whole bunch of artists as 'the other.' The way he works and what he works about is totally inside any number of the art forces right here in the collection.
"This is a 56-year-old man who has been working for all these years in a totally committed way no different from any other artist," she goes on. "We have to respect his lifestyle. I respect a person who's made a life for himself that he's proud of. He's saying that he's living the life he wants to live. How many people can say that?"
The Rubells' interest in Young was piqued by their visit to Tamara Hendershot's gallery, a ramshackle affair located on North Miami Avenue just across the railroad tracks from Overtown. She always has available a small number of Young's works, which she usually buys for a few hundred dollars in exchange for helping the painter deal with his bills and health care. She acknowledges that, like others who buy from Young, she makes a good profit on the paintings.
The collectors looked at Young's paintings in Hendershot's gallery, and she encouraged them to visit his studio. Previously Young had told Hendershot he wanted to unload his stock of paintings. "He was tired of people coming and digging around," Hendershot recounts. "It's an invasion. You're there for two or three hours clumping around the piles. He doesn't help you. He watches Channel 2 or he paints."
She arranged for the Rubells to visit Young in his studio. She also invited Knapp, who has known Young for many years and is currently working on a book with Hendershot on Florida's self-taught artists.
The Rubells had imagined they might buy a few paintings, but soon found themselves negotiating with Young to take it all. "This [artwork] was hanging over his head," recalls Don Rubell, a recently retired obstetrician. With their children Jason and Jennifer, the Rubells own Miami Beach's Greenview and Albion hotels, the Sony building, and other Miami properties. "It was almost like destiny that we arrived when he felt that it was a burden. It felt like he needed to make a move and it was a very natural evolution how the whole thing happened."
It is doubtful the Rubells paid market price for such a large number of paintings. The collectors themselves say the sum is irrelevant; they are not going to make any profit on the work.
"I'm not really impressed," says Horst Kohlem, a German artist and part-time Miami Beach resident who heard about the deal from his friend Knapp. "He should have gotten decent prices for his paintings all along. People were always walking in there and paying 200 bucks or something. Why couldn't [the Rubells] just select a few pieces and pay a decent price? Why buy the whole thing? What is that, a power game? I think it's a macho attitude."
Mera Rubell objects to such criticism. "The whole idea that somebody knows better [than the artist] is in itself obnoxious," she counters. "Who are you or I to say what's right for this man if this is what he chooses for his life?"
Gerard Wertkin, director of New York City's Museum of American Folk Art, is accustomed to hearing differing points of view about self-taught artists such as Purvis Young, whose work will be exhibited at the museum in the fall as part of a major traveling exhibition. "You don't want to assume that the artist is incapable of making a judgment call in terms of how his work should be seen or how it should enter the marketplace," cautions Wertkin, who does not use the term outsider to describe artists. "In the end these are adults who have the right to make those choices."
But Wertkin acknowledges a great potential for abuse. "It becomes a difficult issue," he says, "when artists who have created their work without regard to established or emerging art-world trends suddenly enter that world and find difficulties navigating it."
Racism, he adds, contributes to the problem. "There are issues of race here when you have an African-American artist and dealers who may be white," he says. "I do not believe in a cultural colonialism where either a museum, a dealer, or a collector takes on a kind of paternalistic role. When I meet an artist who is greatly undervaluing his work, I'm quick to suggest that this is so, and hope the artist would take my advice."
Anyone buying Young's work, Wertkin asserts, should compensate him at a level commensurate with the current value of his art; anything else is unacceptable. "In working with a living artist, I would never suggest that he take less than market price," he says. "If you're receiving something you should pay for it and pay fairly."
The museum director contends that the ethical concerns in the milieu of folk and self-taught artists are great, and there are no prescribed answers. "I don't have a solution other than to hope that people who are richly gifted like Purvis Young will ultimately find the right audience," he says, "and that there are people who will step forward to make sure he's treated fairly."
The Rubells' acquisitions may indeed make Young less susceptible to walk-in buyers with speculative intentions. "The people who are going to be most upset," says Don Rubell, "are the people who are used to walking in and stealing what they can steal and selling it at huge profits." But ultimately the Rubells' interest in Young's work should increase its market price, a fact acknowledged by Rubell. "This is America," he reasons. "Whenever we have a shortage, the value goes up." So perhaps not surprisingly, both Joy Moos and Larry Clemons report to be thrilled about the collectors' buyout of the warehouse.
But whatever the market implications, the real value of the Rubells' decision is that it could change Young's place in history. Observes Paula Harper: "The thing about Purvis is he's made good art and it ought to be looked at as art, with no qualifiers. I think Purvis is quite eccentric and obsessive, and to my mind that adds up to the fact that Purvis is a real artist. Who ever said artists have to be businessmen?
"To be an outsider artist in the past ten years was an advantage because it got you noticed," she continues. "[Young] owes his luck to that definition. But now if it needs to be discarded, discard it."
For Jeffrey Knapp that happened the day the Rubells walked into the Overtown studio. "He immediately went from being an outsider artist to being a contemporary artist."
However arbiters of the art world may classify Young, he says he will still choose to remain something of an outsider. "This is my lifestyle," he remarks while standing in his studio recently, which, astoundingly, looks much as it did before the Rubells cleaned it out. Piles of blank pieces of plywood, which Young pays unemployed men in the neighborhood to collect for him, stand in the same spots where his paintings once crowded the floor. The artist has already finished about 50 new paintings, which are leaning against the piles.
As usual his comfortable working chair sits near the front of the room, near a makeshift table covered with paints. A mattress and wool blankets lay on the floor in a separate room at the back of the warehouse. "I been here all my life," he says of Overtown. "At my age I'm not going to go nowhere. I'm a loner, a diabetic. I look at National Geographic, how people live in the wilderness. I couldn't live like that, man."
Young gestures around the room. "I've got enough wood to start again. I'm going to paint some wild horses and what I see in the world. I love just working. I keep my mouth shut and paint the world's problems.
"I'm not worried about what will happen to the work," the artist concludes. "It's not all over yet.
