I grew up in North Florida—horse country—where I spent many weekends at my friend’s dad’s house in Wakulla where we rode ponies bareback through the woods. I would visit South Florida about once a year, a nine hour drive, where my grandparents lived in Fort Lauderdale and Sunrise, cities just outside of Miami. Those visits were mostly contained to the small houses my family lived in, so Miami isn’t a place I feel I know. I know the breeze under a palm tree in my grandmother’s yard, that’s about it. I keep wondering if Purvis Young spent time around horses, since horses populate his paintings. There were horse-drawn buggies in Miami in the forties and fifties, and the racetracks, of course, with Hialeah only twelve miles away from downtown Miami. Davie, Florida was (and still is?) horse country and that’s about twenty miles away. I don’t know much about Liberty City, where Purvis Young was born, or Overtown, where he spent his life, the historic Black towns that are really Miami neighborhoods, not towns. I know these places have the same outline of the story that played out all over our country after the Civil War: segregation, displacement to build highways, constant economic advantage taken by white landlords, mortgage brokers, employers, the city council, the police, etc. Structural racism. The horses that show up in Purvis Young’s paintings were symbols—“freedom horses” he called them. There’s something so impactful about the way these horses are paired with urban settings and angels. Young was spiritual, but not religious. He taught himself to paint from library books about Renaissance paintings, citing as his influences Rembrandt, Picasso, Van Gogh, and Gauguin. “I painted paintings in the gutter—they end up in mansions.”
-Morgan English