The Atlanta-based group boasts work by roughly 160 artists of colour and a string of deals with major US museums hints at a vital shift in the art world.
Through the 1960s and 1970s, Purvis Young, a self-taught artist from Miami, roamed the inner city streets of Overtown, scouring for cardboard, wooden crates and secondhand doors to use as canvas for his expressive paintings. He learned the chops of art history—from Rembrandt to Van Gogh—through library books. He was often called an outsider artist and would paint trains, trucks and railroads to suggest an escape from inner city life, while his pieces told visual tales of racism, poverty and hypocrisy.