January 8, 2007
Artist Finds Inspiration in Prison, Then the Street
By JAVIER BARRERA
Pervis Young sits in his studio in Miami's Overtown section, painting. The television is on, as usual, in the background, but today it is tuned to a football game -- normally, Young watches the History Channel. "I've been here for a thousand years, in Florida," he said. "Me and the alligators."
He is using black acrylic house paint to draw figures onto some scraps of wood that an assistant found on the street. He is surrounded by a vast collection of his work: people riding horses, floating above railroad tracks and large, disembodied heads.
"I paint from my imagination," Young said. "I didn't want to be no ordinary painter."
Young, 63, who grew up in Overtown, has been painting for more than 30 years. He uses recycled material to create his art and has been acknowledged worldwide for his unique and poetic approach.
"Pervis Young has been accepted now conventionally by the art community in South Florida," said Claire Vicary, co-sponsor of the Best of Show for Art Miami 2007, a festival at the Miami Beach Convention Center in early January. "He allows himself to be accessible to the community at large."
Young served three years in prison for breaking and entering when he was in his 20s, and he claims an angel came down to him during that period and told him to start painting. Many of his images include heads surrounded by halos.
But Young also found inspiration on the street.
His Overtown neighborhood was transformed from a vibrant community into a sprawling ghetto in the 1950s and '60s, when an interstate was built through the neighborhood, destroying homes and displacing thousands of people. Crime and drugs have since decimated the area.
Young has chronicled the changes taking place around him, becoming the unofficial historian of Overtown. He recalls his youth with some nostalgia and laments the sad history of his neighborhood.
"And sometimes, I look to heaven, and I ask my Father how the hell we got this way," Young said. "And when I walk among men, all the problems of Overtown, I said, 'Man, I want to paint these things, you know.' "
Young is a self-taught artist, learning from library books and watching public television. He started by painting murals on plywood nailed to the exteriors of abandoned buildings. His mural on Goodbread Alley stood as an emblem of the Overtown community before the interstate was built.
In the 1960s, Young traveled to participate in civil rights marches in Washington and around the South.
"I looked at all these people protesting and all these people riding the buses - 'freedom riders,' " he recalled. "I just started painting these people."
Young's work was recently the subject of a retrospective at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, and he is the recipient of the Director's Choice Award for this year's Art Miami fair. His paintings, which range in price from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands, can be found in galleries and private and major museum collections nationwide.
Young's imagery includes wild horses, marching people, railroad tracks, pregnant women and angel heads. He said they represent his experiences and a vision of hope. They tell, he said, the story of one man's artistic persistence in the face of adversity.
He is awaiting a kidney transplant and gets dialysis treatments three times a week; a recent eye implant helped relieve his cataracts, but he has trouble seeing.
That has not stopped him from painting. "Some people live to paint," Young said, "but I paint to live."
| 
