Purvis Young

"Every day I came and find wood, you know, and put it up on a wall and paint it there in the alley, right off main street, 14th Street. Sometimes I dragged old crates down, you know, those moving crates. That was the biggest I would do. Sometime people would come swipe the paintings. I put a lot of early ones away, but a lot of them just disappeared. I didn't care if my friends take them, I just put another one up. After about two years people started driving in there to see the alley. A lot of tourists. Sometime they would buy a painting right off the wall, put it in their car and drive away. It was mostly white people interested. Some people would say stuff, say I looked like Gauguin, all different artists they say I looked like. A lot of black people seen them but they didn't say much to me about it. Some of them said I was mad, some cursed me out, some said I was sick. Some liked it, some of them admired me, some didn't. A friend of mine—he's passed away now—say to me, I look at your paintings but I don't see nothing. But every time I turn around you're in the newspaper." (Interviews with Purvis Young by William Arnett and Larry Clemons in 1994 and 1995, https://www.soulsgrowndeep.org/artist/purvis-young)