Purvis Young

1943-2010 · Miami, USA

He nailed his paintings to the boarded-up buildings of Goodbread Alley until the whole street was his, wild horses and angels galloping over Overtown’s plywood.

The life

Young grew up in Liberty City and Overtown, Miami neighbourhoods gutted by highway construction, and taught himself art from library books after a spell in prison as a young man. In the early 1970s he began painting on salvaged doors, cabinet panels and book pages, and mounting them publicly on derelict buildings. He painted tens of thousands of works, kept warehouses of them, gave them away, and was collected by museums across America before his death in 2010.

The work

Processions of wild horses, blue angels over tenements, pregnant women, boats fleeing to freedom, funerals and street crowds, painted urgently in house paint with brush, fingers and sticks, often framed by the found object’s own battered edges. Libraries of altered books, painted page by page.

Why we love them

He did not wait for a gallery; he annexed a street. Public art with no commission, no committee and no brakes.

Go deeper

• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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