"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.
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