"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.

Before the high rises, the nightlife, and the fashion scene, Miami's South Beach was a retirement haven for American Jews. In The Last Resort, photographer Gary Monroe presents a collection of images that preserve his observations of this vanished time. After World War II, Jewish retirees from the Northeast-many of whom had come to America to escape Nazi Germany-found comfort, camaraderie, and culture in the sunny island city of Miami Beach. By the late 1950s, the population was 80% Jewish, and eventually the neighborhood of South Beach became home to a strong community of elderly Jews. A local who grew up in a Jewish household during this time, enchanted by the deep-rooted traditions and close-knit society of the older men and women he saw around him, Monroe set out to capture their world.Taken over the span of 10 years, Monroe's photographs chronicle the day-to-day activities of the community from sunrise to sunset. Full of energy, love, misery, and heartbreak, these images portray a shared vision of richly lived lives. During this time, card rooms became makeshift temples. People enjoyed sunrise swims in the ocean. The streets were active. Neighbors cared for each other. On Friday evenings, women lit Shabbos candles. Through these scenes, Monroe's work documents the efforts of the aging South Beach residents to maintain their dignity, mores, and lifestyle. The Last Resort memorializes an era, a culture, and a history. Gary Monroe offers an exquisitely rendered portrait of a special community most people have forgotten.

In the age of railroads and steamships, of frontier Florida and the tourism boom of the early 1900s, photographer E. G. Barnhill set up shop in the young city of St. Petersburg. He pioneered a popular new type of tourist art, colorizing black-and-white snapshots taken by himself and his customers. He sold many of his hand-colored photographs as postcards or home decor. Barnhill applied watercolors to black-and-white prints according to his own sense of light and palette and his interpretation of consumer demand. Visitors wanted one-of-a-kind works of art to help them remember the experience of Florida. Unlike other colorists of the time whose landscapes were airbrushed to appear dreamy and ethereal, Barnhill captured the state's clear, brisk colors with richness and intensity. He pushed aside conventions by using matte instead of glossy print paper to soak up colors better, and with radical experiments in gold toning and uranium dyes, which created unearthly hues. Filled with vibrant images of Barnhill's unique creations, precursors to the popular landscape art of the Highwaymen and others, this book showcases a little-known artist whose inventive techniques-particularly his uranium-dye coloring-merit a place in the story of American photography. A fascinating mix of photographic realism and individual artistic vision, his work reveals both the Florida that was and the Florida that tourists wanted to believe in.

The undervalued force behind the Highwaymen phenomenon. A long-awaited testament to the life and work of Alfred Hair, the driving force of the Florida Highwaymen, this book introduces a charismatic personality whose energy and creativity were foundational to the success of his fellow African American artists during the era of Jim Crow segregation. Shot and killed in a barfight at the age of 29, Hair lived his short life fully, with a zest and intensity that informed his art. In high school he made canvas frames in the Fort Pierce studio of A. E. Backus, the painter who inspired the style of the Highwaymen, and soon became the artist's protege. By the time Hair graduated in 1961, he was painting luminous South Florida landscapes and selling them door to door. One of the only formally trained Highwaymen, he spurred on the collective of artists as they traversed the state in search of the white clientele who would buy their artwork.Hair's paintings, reproduced here in brilliant color, are marked by their spontaneous, gestural, carefree flair. He was known for his fast painting, which yielded a sense of place well-suited for Florida's postwar residents. These oil paintings hung in their homes and offices like trophies. Sold before the oils were dry, Hair's paintings appeared to their first owners to glow from within. "Alfred could paint as fast as he wanted and as good as he wanted," said Highwayman Al Black. Hair would work on as many as 20 paintings at once to make more money. His goal, as he often declared, was to be a millionaire.Gary Monroe describes Hair's upbringing, growth as an artist, and romantic escapades and marriage, ending with the tragic events that unfolded at the juke joint known as Eddie's Place the night of August 9, 1970. Alfred Hair remembers a man who lifted the spirits of the Highwaymen painters and enhanced the idea of Florida through his art.