MOAD Talks: Miami as Archive: Memory, Place, and the Legacy of Purvis Young

This MOAD Talks panel brings together three South Florida cultural practitioners: Tayina Deravile, Cultural Arts Practitioner, Independent Curator, and Gallery Manager at Girls' Club; Barbara Young, Art Librarian, Curator, and Art Services Supervisor for the Miami-Dade Public Library System, as well as Co-founder of the Vasari Project; and Terrence Cribbs-Lórrant, Executive Director and Cultural Curator of the Black Police Precinct and Courthouse Museum. Through exhibition-making and public programming centered on the archives of Purvis Young, each panelist has engaged Young’s work as a lens through which to consider broader questions of artistic legacy, memory, and archival practice in Miami.

This panel will examine their distinct cultural frameworks and consider how artist legacies shape and are shaped by archival practices in the city. In doing so, the discussion highlights how their perspectives illuminate different dimensions of Young’s practice. The conversation will explore which aspects of Young’s visual language, material choices, and thematic concerns informed their creative processes. It will also reflect on how his work offers a lens for understanding memory, place, and archives in Miami, as well as how his practice occupied and transformed space within South Florida art contexts.

Collectively, the panel situates Young’s legacy within Miami’s evolving art historical canon, foregrounding his continued relevance to the city’s cultural and social landscape.

By engaging these voices, the program invites audiences to encounter Young’s practice through layered perspectives, revealing the many ways his work speaks to Miami’s histories of migration, resilience, spirituality, race, and urban change.

Image: Purvis Young, Group of Figures. Paint on board and wood, ca. 1990. Donation of Mr. Richard Levine.

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Host or Publisher Museum of Art and Design (MOAD) at MDC