Florida Highwaymen

The Highwaymen, also referred to as the Florida Highwaymen, are a group of 26 African American landscape artists in Florida. Self-taught and Self-Mentoring, they created a body of work of over 200,000 paintings, despite facing many racial and cultural barriers. Mostly from the Fort Pierce area, they painted landscapes and made a living selling them door-to-door to businesses and individuals throughout Florida from the mid-1950s through the 1980s. They also peddled their work from the trunks of their cars along the eastern coastal roads (A1A and US 1).

For over 50 years The Highwaymen created large numbers of relatively inexpensive landscape paintings using construction materials rather than traditional art supplies. As no galleries would accept their work, they sold them in towns and cities and along roadsides throughout Florida, often still wet, out of the trunks of their cars. Their success and longevity is remarkable considering they began their career in the racially unsettled and violent times of the 50s in Florida and amid the social conditions of the Jim Crow South where the stirrings of the civil rights movement were only just beginning. They have been called "The Last Great American Art Movement of the 20th century".

In the 50s and 60s, it was impossible to find galleries interested in selling artworks by a group of unknown, self-taught African Americans. Instead they sold their art directly to the public rather than through galleries and art agents. Rediscovered in the mid-1990s, today they are recognized as an important part of American folk history.

In 1970 one of the original members of the group, Alfred Hair, who was also considered to be the main catalyst and soul of the group, was killed. Subsequently, some of the group's creative energy and direction were lost, the remaining members created fewer paintings, and productivity waned. However they were re-discovered in the mid-1990s by Jim Fitch, a Florida art historian, and Jeff Klinkenberg of the St. Petersburg Times wrote several newspaper articles about the Florida Highwaymen in August 1995. Since then they have become celebrated for their idyllic landscapes of natural settings in Florida. The 26 Florida Highwaymen were inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame in 2004.

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