The Florida Highwaymen Landscape Artists unwittingly crafted what is known as The Last Great American Art Movement of the 20th Century. This first blog is a brief overview of these important artists. Bi-weekly blogs will include lesser-known information about individual early Highwaymen, the relationships between them, and their significance within the art movement. I will also share details from various interviews that I do with individuals "in-the-know" within the Highwaymen art world today.
WHAT THE ARTISTS PAINTED: The 25 African American men and one woman known as The Florida Highwaymen since the 1990s already had been painting their colorful landscapes for decades. Mostly self-taught, the first early Highwaymen began painting Florida's unspoiled nature the early 1950s. They used vibrant yellows and oranges to depict Florida's sunrises and sunsets and bright reds, purples, and yellows to create the State's large flowering trees – Royal Poincianas, Jacarandas, and Tabebuias. These artists also crafted ocean and river scenes complete with windswept palms, frothy waves, sandy shores, boats, docks, fishing shacks, and birds (egrets, seagulls, spoonbills, etc.). Their backcountry scenes include tall pines, weeping cypress, oaks, marshes, ponds, and a vast array of animals such as wild turkey, boar, deer, cows, and gators.
WHAT'S IN THE NAME: Former curator of Florida Museum of Art and Culture Jim Fitch sought out and named these artists Highwaymen in the mid 1990s. Fitch, along with former Miami journalist Jeff Klinkenberg, studied the work of these artists who first painted and sold their art during segregation in the Deep South. The criteria that Fitch used to name the artists, though rarely specifically written about or explained, included: shared race, geographic area at some point in their lives (the historically black sections of Fort Pierce and Gifford, Florida), socioeconomic status, painting style, painting genre, and method of selling (taking to the road with paintings in the trunks of their cars).
Today, the Highwaymen are well known for their colorful art, often fast brush strokes (depending upon the artist), induction into the Florida Artists' Hall of Fame in 2004, and having their art displayed in the Florida Governor's Mansion, The White House, and on movie sets. Their paintings are celebrated as masterpieces of The Indian River School of Art. Starting during the period of Jim Crow laws in southern Florida, these artists persevered against all odds to preserve Florida's vanishing wilderness and natural beauty.