View of the Purvis Young Mural before conservation on the Bakehouse Art Complex facade. Photos by Diana Espín, 2022.
Bakehouse Art Complex invites you to join City of Miami Chairwoman + District 5 Commissioner Christine King and Bank of America Miami President Gene Schaefer and Senior VP Vania Laguerre to celebrate the completion of the conservation of Purvis Young’s mural.
Join us for the “reveal” on the east-facing facade of Bakehouse Art Complex. Sweet treats, courtesy of Salty Donut, will be served!
We also welcome you to visit artists’ studios from 11 am to 6 pm for the annual county-wide event Artists Open. Free admission.
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Bakehouse thanks Bank of America Conservation Art Project, for enabling us to retain RLA Conservation to stabilize, conserve, and protect this iconic mural.
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Please enter through the pedestrian gate adjacent to the yellow building facing 32nd Street.
Free street parking is available on 32nd Street and 6th Avenue and in the Jose de Diego Middle School parking lot across the street (entrance faces 6th Avenue).
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More about the artist, the mural, and the conversation process:
Born in Liberty City, Purvis Young was a self-taught artist. He came to prominence through the development of Goodbread Alley, a site-specific intervention that involved attaching large painted panels to dilapidated buildings in Overtown, an historic Miami neighborhood that was the epicenter of Black culture in the city. The ambition of this work, which eventually was destroyed, propelled Young to local notoriety, and he became “perhaps the most famous painter to ever come out of Florida” as opined in a Washington Post article.
With Bank of American funding, Bakehouse was able to retain experts to stabilize, conserve, and protect an iconic mural by one of Miami’s most prolific artists on our exterior wall. RLA Conservation undertook detailed documentation and testing of the materials of fabrication. The process involved employing methods and techniques for cleaning to remove dirt, fungus, and accretions, consolidating flaking and disaggregating paint, determining how faded the mural was and whether there were ethical and reversible ways to saturate the color, removing and replacing old repairs and retouching losses, coating to protect the surface, and preparing a maintenance program to keep the mural in good condition.
Although the mural is dated 2003, it likely was created sometime between 1998 and 2003. It was commissioned in part as community service project, facilitated by Rosie Gordon Wallace, a prominent Miami curator and a friend of the artist. It is one of three surviving murals by the artist.
Wynwood, the neighborhood Bakehouse Art Complex has called home since opening in 1986, has become a globally renowned arts destination, primarily because of the quality and quantity of its street and mural art. While many have been replaced or lost to time, Purvis Young’s mural preceded the influx of street art in the area (which began in the mid-to-late 2000s). It remains an important record of the neighborhood's cultural and social history. It not only tells an important story about artmaking in Miami, but it is a lesson in the importance of recognizing and protecting our local cultural patrimony.
