From Outsider to Insider

"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.