No, “Highwaymen” does not refer
to robbers on the Florida highways!
In the late 1950’s a collective
of twenty-five loosely-associated African-American men and one woman from the Ft. Pierce and
Vero Beach, Florida, areas painted their way out of the despair awaiting them in the
citrus groves and packing houses of south Florida. The Highwaymen created
idyllic, quickly-realized images of the Florida dream and peddled some 50,000
of them from the trunks of their cars to restaurants, businesses, and anyone
passing by. Hence, the name, “Highwaymen.”
Why am I writing about the
Florida Highwaymen? Because when my sister and I met at Heron Cay Inn in Mt.
Dora, Florida, in February of this year, over 100 of these paintings surrounded
us on the walls.
Southern segregation was in its
prime in the ‘50’s (no galleries for these artists!) and roaming the streets
with a stack of framed paintings was suspicious. Anonymity and quickness were
the keys to their success. In addition, a white landscape artist from Ft.
Pierce named A. E. “Bean” Backus invited African-American high school student
A. E. Hair to paint in his studio. Hair became the star of the group, wowing
buyers with burnt-orange skies or unnaturally florescent yellow, aqua, or peach
clouds. He would mix a specific color and apply it across various canvases at
once, creating twenty landscapes at a breakneck pace. The paintings originally
sold for $20 - $25 and enabled Hair to buy a Cadillac, which served as his storefront.
An amorphous group, some of whom
painted together on Sundays, the artists spurred each other on to create
faster, competing to see who could sell the most. They painted on inexpensive
Upson boards used by roofers and created frames from crown moldings. Shrubs
were roughed-in; grass was a few brush strokes; subjects were minimally
depicted. The imprecise but lively brushwork with slashed-in highlights became
Hair’s trademark. Characterized early on as “motel art,” the paintings reflected
popular visions of Florida: the ocean, the setting sun, wind-swept palms,
billowing cumulus clouds.
With Hair’s death in a barroom
brawl in 1970 at the age of 29, the group disbanded and eventually sales waned.
After Florida art dealer Jim Finch named the group in 1994, interest revived as
an American art form, a depiction of a place where one could realize the
American dream. Today the paintings sell for as much as tens of thousands of
dollars and are owned by Michelle Obama and Shaquille O’Neal.
Photos are my own. Information in
this article from:
Hurd, Gordon.
“Alfred Hair” in the “Overlooked” section, N.Y.
Times, February 3, 2019, pg. 8.
Monroe, Gary. The Highwaymen: Florida’s African-American
Landscape Painters, The University Press of Florida, 2001.
