Purvis Young

Born: 1943, Florida; Died 2010, Florida

Purvis Young was one of South Florida's most celebrated artists. Entirely self-taught, Young communicated a social message with his work, depicting the poverty, crime and other social issues of his hometown community of Overtown. Instead of canvas, he painted on discarded objects, which included doors, cardboard and pieces of wood.

Young credited art with turning his wayward life around, after having served a prison term in the mid-1960s.

Young's works are in many museum collections, including those of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, Florida and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. In addition, his artworks have been regularly been shown at galleries, primarily in Miami and Southern Florida, such as in a 1972 installation at the Miami Museum of Modern Art, but also nationwide, from exhibitions at the Springfield (Ohio) Museum of Art (1999) to the art museum of the University of Memphis (2004), as well as in commercial galleries from New York City to Cologne, Germany.