Purvis Young was another star of the Outsider fair. His paintings capture the energy, rhythm, and pathos of Overtown, the African-American neighborhood in Miami, and call to mind the expressive oils of French painter Georges Rouault. Jimmy Hedges of Rising Fawn Folk Art, Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, offered a broad selection of Young's work and sold all but one of the ten he had on view at the show and sold ten more from photographs he had on hand. He drove back to New York City from Tennessee the following week to deliver them. Young pastes his works on paper in books he scavenges, and these books with their glued pages become sculptural objects.
Outsider art is a hot commodity.
Kind's stand was a veritable mini-museum of Outsider art, and it included a dozen works by one of the old masters of the movement, Martin Ramirez, a Mexican who migrated to California and spent most of his life in the De Witt State Hospital where he died in 1963. His images of saints or animals are framed by strong parallel lines washed with watercolors, creating tunnels and doorways that lead the viewer into his private world. Art is the primary obsession for these artists. The art-making process consumed their entire life, and many of them invented unique vocabularies of form consistent from work to work. The Outsider Art Fair is a mix of the old masters and newcomers.