From Outsider to Insider

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.