From Outsider to Insider

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.