From the South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Best Shrine to a South Florida Artist

September 21 2005

Gallery 721/Purvis Young Museum
721 Progresso Drive, Fort Lauderdale, 954/765-0721

There's love, and then, there's obsession. We surmise that Gallery 721 owner Larry Clemons is touched with both when it comes to the work of primitive painter Purvis Young. Clemons has been pounding the outsider art drum for more than two decades in South Florida, but his latest locale in a Fort Lauderdale industrial district is nothing less than a house of worship for the urban folk artist from Overtown. Clemons' 6,000-square-foot space is filled from floor to ceiling with Young's divine creations, including his realist drawings from the mid-1960s to the abstract paintings he has produced recently in a Miami warehouse. Clemons' devotion took a more serious turn this year when Young's kidneys failed. Clemons has seen that the artist is cared for medically and is working to get the painter healthy enough to receive a transplant. Clemons and Young have also worked together on a documentary film titled Purvis of Overtown, which Clemons hopes to enter in the Sundance Film Festival.