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Purvis Young, Folk Artist Who Peppered Miami with Images, Dies

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Purvis Young, a self-taught painter who emerged from prison as a young man and by dint of his striking, expressionist vision of urban life and mammoth output over more than three decades transformed a forgotten Miami neighborhood into a destination for contemporary art aficionados, died on Tuesday in Miami. He was 67.

An untitled painting on paper and mounted on cardboard by Mr. Young. Many of his works were made on found materials. The cause was cardiac arrest and pulmonary edema, said Dindy Yokel, a friend. Mr. Young was a diabetic and had several health problems in recent years, including a kidney transplant in 2007.

Mr. Young, who never attended high school, was often called an outsider artist or a street artist, and he lived a life that only intermittently surfaced on the art-world grid. But he was influenced by a number of artists -- including Rembrandt, El Greco, van Gogh and Delacroix -- whose works he pored over in art books in the public library.

“His great ability was to twin urban contemporary culture with high- art motifs," said Brooke Davis Anderson, a curator at the American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan, which has 20 of Mr. Young's pieces in its collection, 14 donated by the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, which bought the entire contents of Mr. Young's studio, as many as 3,000 pieces, in 1999.

His work can also be found in the collections of the Bass Museum in Miami, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, the High Museum in Atlanta, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among many other places.

Painted or drawn in ink on found materials as diverse as cardboard, discarded doors, orange crates, telephone bills, printed book pages and manila folders, Mr. Young's work often concerned itself with cacophonous, urgent representations of urban strife. He lived most of his life in the Overtown section of Miami, a once-thriving community that was ravaged by the construction of an interstate highway through it in the 1960s, and he painted what he saw around him.

His work featured writhing calligraphic lines often denoting crowds of people, frenzied bursts of color and repeated symbols -- a personal iconography that included horses, which, as he explained in interviews, denoted freedom; angels and large floating heads, which denoted good people and the possibility of goodness in a strife- riven world; and round blue shapes, sometimes coalescing into eyes that denoted an all- seeing establishment.

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