This is an original Purvis Young mixed media collage mounted on an original guest ledger from the famous Overton celebrity fixture called the Sir John Hotel. The work is Signed. This work is important and rare. The Sir John Hotel was a center of black culture in Miami in the 1950's and 1960's. Among many historic events, the pool at the hotel was the setting for the most important photograph of Muhammad Ali (boxing underwater in the pool). See more history below. Purvis Young would have found the ledger from the Sir John Hotel after it was closed and torn down. There is a certain irony in Purvis Young making art from "a scrap of trash paper" from a place that was once a landmark for the black community. The buyer will receive a COA with background on the provenance.

CIRCA: 1980

ORIGIN: USA

DIMENSIONS: H: 13" x 17" (work)

Framed 21" x 24.5"

The Sir John Hotel

The Sir John Hotel was originally built as the Lord Calvert Hotel in 1951, and was home to the popular nightclub Knight Beat. The Knight Beat was an essential stop on the Chitlin Circuit, the parallel music world that many black artists traveled in the days of segregation. The hotel’s bustling pool was a popular hangout for visiting artists and prominent Black leaders, and the scene of Muhammad Ali’s most famous posed photo. Flip Schulke took the striking underwater photo of Ali with fists raised at the Sir John Hotel.

“And so he does. Killens put Overtown on the national map as one the hottest black entertainment pockets in the country during the 1950s and ’60s. Back then, he brought in legends like Dinah Washington, Count Basie and Sammy Davis Jr., who performed nightly in clubs like the Sir John Hotel’s Knight Beat, which he managed.

Back in those days, Killens was known as “Miami’s Mr. Entertainment” His domain included Overtown’s hot spots: Harlem Square, the Island Club and Mary Elizabeth’s Hotel Fiesta Club. And the names were big: Mary Wells, Sam and Dave, Hot Papa Turner, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Jackie Wilson, Sammy Davis Jr., Frank DuBoise. Black performers would play at whites-only stages in Miami Beach, then drive across the bay to play Overtown. Often they saved their funkiest sets for those late-night gigs with Clyde; the audiences were often anything but segregated, whites knowing that Overtown was were the real shows were happening.

The clubs were filled nightly with both whites and blacks who did dances like the Madison, the Hully Gully and the Chicken Scratch “like they had rehearsed it the night before. It was just something to see, a hundred of them on the dance floor.” The next day, from 3 to 6 p.m., the neighborhood kids were let in. For a dollar, they’d get dancers, comedians and a singer.”

”The local talent was so amazing,” says Ellis, the jazz musician. “It was like a big pot that was simmering, and anybody could come and bring their bit. It made a hell of a meal.”

Overtown was an essential stop on the Chitlin Circuit, the parallel music world that many black artists traveled in the days of segregation. But it was also close to Miami Beach, where local musicians and national stars like Lena Horne, Count Basie, Nat King Cole, Duke Ellington, B.B. King, Ella Fitzgerald, James Brown and Aretha Franklin entertained at white hotels.

Blacks, even if they were stars, weren’t allowed to spend the night in those hotels. So after the show, they would take their talented selves, and often their white fans, back across the railroad tracks to Overtown.” (Source: GoingOverton Organization)

Purvis Young

Purvis Young was a self-taught African-American artist known for his expressive collages and paintings. Made on found objects, including scrap metal, book pages, and discarded envelopes, his richly colored depictions of trucks, figures, and coil-shaped abstractions, described a fraught yet inspired experience of living in the poverty stricken Overtown neighborhood of Miami. “What I say is the world is getting worser, guys pushing buggies, street people not having no jobs here in Miami, drugs kill the young, and church people riding around in luxury cars,” he once remarked. Born on February 4, 1943 in Liberty City, FL, he learned to draw from his uncle at a young age but never had any formal art training. It was during his incarceration at the Raiford State Penitentiary from 1961–1961 as a teenager, that he began drawing prolifically. Years after his release, Young’s creative output attracted the attention of Bernard Davis, the owner of the Miami Art Museum. Davis subsequently brought the artist’s work into the public eye, and by the 1970s, tourists and collectors regularly visited Young in Goodbread Alley where he lived and worked. Inspired by books on Rembrandt, Vincent van Gogh, El Greco, and Paul Gauguin, as well as documentaries on American history, Young’s work grew in scope and formal invention throughout the latter part of his career. The artist died on April 20, 2010 in Miami, FL. Today, his works are held in the collections of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the American Folk Art Museum in New York, and the de Young Museum of Art in San Francisco, among others.

According to Art in America "In interviews, he [Young] often referred to his work as a form of protest art, and among the twenty major paintings at Salon 94 were several that portrayed crowds of people demonstrating in the streets. Each panel in the diptych Untitled (Protesters), ca. 1990s, features a group of schematic figures outlined in black. On the left hand panel, two central figures are shown with their arms raised in the air; depicted below the crowd is a row of tenement buildings. In both panels, the subjects seem to vibrate in ethereal spaces—fiery red on the left and primarily greenish on the right—as is typical in Young’s work.