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"I paint the angels because the angles trying to clean up the neighborhood. They trying to make mankind strong. Sometimes when angels have come down to try to tell bad peoples what to do, they have hung the angels."

In the 1960s, Purvis Young was serving time in the Florida State Penitentiary for breaking and entering. While in prison, he began drawing and studying art, finding inspiration in the work of Rembrandt, El Greco, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Picasso.

After his release, Young began making what would become thousands of small drawings on found paper—correspondence, manila folders, bank statements, bills, memos—thrown away by offices and small manufacturing plants on the fringes of his community. He kept his drawings in shopping carts and later glued them into magazines he found in the street and discarded books from the Culmer/Overtown Branch Library.

In his dawings, Purvis documented the social life, sexual rituals, playground sports, and the struggling and suffering of his Miami neighborhood of Overtown. Once a thriving community of Jamaican immigrants, Overtown had been decimated by the construction of Interstate 395 in the late 1960s.

He returned again and again to favorite topics—basketball, horses, pregnant women, funerals, boats at sea, people of the streets—and would occasionally create a book with a hundred or more drawings dedicated to a single theme.