"For the first time, the real story behind the Highwaymen has emerged . . . a well-researched, lively, and comprehensive overview of the development and contribution of these African-American artists and their place in the history of Florida's popular culture."--Mallory McCane O'Connor, author of "Lost Cities of the Ancient Southeast"

"The Highwaymen" introduces a group of young black artists who painted their way out of the despair awaiting them in citrus groves and packing houses of 1950s Florida. As their story recaptures the imagination of Floridians and their paintings fetch ever-escalating prices, the legacy of their freshly conceived landscapes exerts a new and powerful influence on the popular conception of the Sunshine State.

While the value of Highwaymen paintings has soared in recent years, until now no authoritative account of the lives and work of these black Florida artists has existed. Emerging in the late 1950s, the Highwaymen created idyllic, quickly realized images of the Florida dream and peddled some 100,000 of them from the trunks of their cars.
Working with inexpensive materials, the Highwaymen produced an astonishing number of landscapes that depict a romanticized Florida--a faraway place of wind-swept palm trees, billowing cumulus clouds, wetlands, lakes, rivers, ocean, and setting sun. With paintings still wet, they loaded their cars and traveled the state's east coast, selling the images door-to-door and store-to-store, in restaurants, offices, courthouses, and bank lobbies.
Sometimes characterized as motel art, the work is a hybrid form of landscape painting, corrupting the classically influenced ideals of the Highwaymen's white mentor, A. E. "Bean" Backus. At first, the paintings sold like boom-time real estate. In succeeding decades, however, they were consigned to attics and garage sales. Rediscovered in the mid-1990s, today they are recognized as the work of American folk artists.
Gary Monroe tells the story behind the Highwaymen, a loose association of 25 men and 1 woman from the Ft. Pierce area--a fascinating mixture of individual talent, collective enterprise, and cultural heritage. He also offers a critical look at the paintings and the movement's development. Added to this are personal reminiscences by some of the artists, along with a gallery of 63 full-color reproductions of their paintings.
Gary Monroe, professor of visual art at Daytona Beach Community College, is a documentary photographer with a long-time interest in "outsider" and vernacular art. His work has been recognized with numerous exhibitions and awards, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Foundation, and he has been a popular lecturer for the Florida Humanities Council's Speakers Bureau. His photographs have been published in "Cassadaga: The South's Oldest Spiritualist Community" (UPF, 2000), which he coedited; "Life in South Beach" (1989); and "Florida Dreams" (1993). He lives in DeLand, Florida.

African-American art has made an increasingly vital contribution to the art of the United States from the time of its origins in early-eighteenth-century slave communities. This major reassessment of the subject discusses folk and decorative arts such as ceramics, furniture, and quilts alongside fine art -- sculptures, paintings, and photography -- produced by African Americans, both enslaved and free, throughout the nineteenth century. It explores art and politics, the influence of galleries and museums, and examines the New Negro Movement of the 1920s, the Era of Civil Rights and Black Nationalism through the 1960s and 1970s, and the emergence of new black artists and theorists in the 1980s and 1990s. African-American Art shows that in its cultural diversity and synthesis of cultures it mirrors those in American society as a whole.

`a much needed text. . . breaks down the barrier between folk and formal art, and articulates an interrelationship of both concepts to African-American people and their culture' Keith Morrison, Artist and Dean of the College of Arts, San Francisco State University.

`a fine survey of contemporary African-American art and ideas... a volume, which, like no other, can be used both as an unusual reference book and a good read' Emma Amos, Artist and Professor of Art at Rutgers University

Soul Mates takes a serious and ironic look at popular icons in western American culture--cowboy boots and masterpieces in western art--to explore American cultural values and pervasive themes in twentieth century art. Cowboy boots are examined as markers of western life, as works of art, and subjects of works of art. The author has selected stellar examples of boots made by skilled and famous boot makers, including Lucchese, Tony Lama, and C. C. McGuffin, to offer a counterpoint to the "fine art" more typically considered. He has also selected drawings, paintings, prints, and photographs that reflect the changing attitudes and perceptions of western culture over the past 50 years and raise conceptual issues about western mores and modern life. Featured are works by Barbara Van Cleve, Frederick Hammersley, Bruce Nauman, Hal West, Luis A. Jimenez, Jr., and many others whose art define and redefine aspects of Western mythology and culture. The text examines the contemporary art forms that shape the current representation of the cowboy and the West in modern life and explores the origins of cowboy imagery; the isolation of ranch life; the non-traditional roles of female cobblers; and the depictions of boot wearers (both male and female) as powerful, sexual, and independent. Soul Mates is published to coincide with an exhibition to open at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico in May 2010.

A practical and inspirational guide to textile folk art from cultures all around the world, accompanied by step-by-step projects. From samplers and quilts in Europe, to tribal and nomadic cloth further afield in Mongolia and China, folk and traditional designs have played a crucial part in the development of textile art and craft. In this book, Anne Kelly explores the traditional motifs used in textile folk art and shows you how contemporary textile artists use these in their work today. The beautifully illustrated guide is also packed with helpful step-by-step projects that demonstrate how to apply folk motifs to your own work. Drawing inspiration from the Far East to Scandinavia, artists and designers have often used folk art to influence their work. Beginning with the chapter 'Samplers in Stitch', Anne looks into handmade momentoes and souvenirs created in the UK and USA. Samplers as statement pieces are also explored and are contextualised within the role of women and children recording their personal histories and lives. 'Nordic Notes' then looks at Scandinavian traditional textile art, and how modern screen printing and embroidery have been used by contemporary makers. 'Silk Road' looks at the influence of nomadic cultures and textiles, including yurts in Mongolia and Miao folklore in China. Projects on how to make felt, pouched and jewellery are also covered. Lastly, 'Trees of Life' looks the motif of the tree in a variety of cultures. Anne also looks at traditional techniques from South Asia and how to create your own 'Family Tree' using photo transfers and applique. Featuring step-by-step projects as well as work from contemporary artists and makers throughout, this practical and beautiful guide shows how practitioners of all kinds can draw from folk art for making and inspiration.

What do exotic area rugs, handcrafted steel-string guitars, and fiddling have in common today? Many contemporary tradition bearers embrace complexity in form and content. They construct objects and performances that draw on the past and evoke nostalgia effectively but also reward close attention. In Rugs, Guitars, and Fiddling: Intensification and the Rich Modern Lives of Traditional Arts, author Chris Goertzen argues that this entails three types of change that can be grouped under an umbrella term: intensification. First, traditional creativity can be intensified through virtuosity, through doing hard things extra fluently. Second, performances can be intensified through addition, by packing increased amounts of traditional materials into the conventionally sized packages. Third, in intensification through selection, artistic impact can grow even if amount of information recedes by emphasizing compelling ideas-e.g., crafting a red and black viper poised to strike rather than a pretty duck decoy featuring more colors and contours. Rugs handwoven in southern Mexico, luthier-made guitars, and southern US fiddle styles experience parallel changes, all absorbing just enough of the complex flavors, dynamics, and rhythms of modern life to translate inherited folklore into traditions that can be widely celebrated today. New mosaics of details and skeins of nuances don't transform craft into esoteric fine art, but rather enlist the twists and turns and endless variety of the contemporary world therapeutically, helping transform our daily chaos into parades of negotiable jigsaw puzzles. Intensification helps make crafts and traditional performances more accessible and understandable and thus more effective, bringing past and present closer together, helping folk arts continue to perform their magic today.