The English language is tricky. Take the word “vision” for example. By one definition, vision is the ability of the eye to see what it’s looking at. The other definition of vision is about imagination: the ability to conjure up a picture of something beyond everyday reality. In other words, vision is either seeing what’s there, or what’s not there.
And then there’s the combination of both: where a person can be looking at the same thing you’re looking at, but they see something different.
Valen Purvis, Founder & Owner of Transit, a mobile clothing store housed in a bus he bought and renovated when he was 15. Today he’s 17.
Valen Purvis was just 15 years old when he saw a bus for sale. He bought it. For $2,000. But the vision Valen had wasn’t driving himself to school in his own bus. It was a mobile clothes store. He ripped out the bus’s seats, renovated the interior, installed racks and shelving, and launched Transit Street Wear. Today you can go to Transit’s Instagram account, I Love Transit, find out where the bus is stopping, and go clothes shopping.
Normally when we talk about the non-literal meaning of “vision” we’re talking about picturing something that’s going to happen in the future. Marcus Brown’s visions are different – they’re a combination of the present and the past.
Marcus Brown, a digital artist and teacher at NOCCA, is both creator of the groundbreaking augmented reality piece Slavery Trails and of augmented reality pieces for commercial use from city tours to neurology
When you walk down Esplanade Avenue in New Orleans, or Wall Street in New York, you see a street.If you use an augmented realty app on your phone or other device, and you point it at a QR code, you’ll see what Marcus Brown sees.
Marcus is an artist. In a series of works in a collection called “Slavery Trails” he’s created augmented reality pieces in which enslaved people appear on your device as real people. They’re not frozen in a historical setting like a painting or a photo. They appear to be real 3-D people standing right in front of you. They have the appearance and demeanor of slaves in the 1700’s, but they’re on the same modern street you’re on right now, with pedestrians, cars, and the rest of the current world going on around them.
It’s an incredibly moving and effective commentary – and it’s only one strand of Marcus’s art works which are in galleries and exhibitions across the country and around the world.
Peter Ricchiuti, Marcus Brown, Valen Purvis & Philip Purvis – Valen’s dad and bus driver – Out to Lunch at Columns on St Charles Avenue in Uptown New Orleans
The act of putting two things together that have never been thought of as connected is sometimes called “creativity.” Other times it’s called “genius.” Probably the most impactful example would be the combination of a phone and a camera. Today you can barely imagine they were ever separate devices, but when the first mobile phone was manufactured with a camera, nobody could have foreseen Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and the whole way of life that simple piece of creativity gave rise to.
If we were to meet back here 10 years from now, who knows how many mobile clothes stores there might be, or what the state of augmented reality art will look like. Whether or not Marcus and Valen are ultimately creators of a whole new approach to art and retail and change the world, the fact is they’ve both already made a mark in their respective fields, and that is no small achievement.
Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at Columns in Uptown New Orleans. Photos by Jill Lafleur.
