The Art of Business

The Florida Highwaymen

Whether it’s Andy Warhol in New York, or Richard Diebenkorn in Southern California, the artists of an area or a city, tend to define that city.  Such is true of the Florida Highwaymen.  From the desks of the Miami luxury hotels, to the roadside diners, a group of African-American artists left their mark on the state of Florida.  In a southern state, it was a bewildering and a beautiful time, the 1950’s.  Twenty-six artists took their creativity, and their destinies into their own hands when they began to sell their landscape and seascape paintings out of the trunks of their cars, along the highways that criss-cross the state of Florida.

Their colors were vivid and vibrant, and their compositions exemplified life on the coast in a way that moved all of those who were lucky enough to come across them and their works as they made their family road-trips and holidays.  Palm trees bent by the tropical and forceful winds, calm sunsets and the blossoms of the poinciana bushes were their subject matter.  They had no fancy warehouse studios in New York City nor formal training, they painted what they saw and what they felt, on the side of the road or in each others’ garages…loaded up their vehicles each weekend and sold their work to unsuspecting tourists.

The original “highway man” was Alfred Hair.  He gained confidence under the tutelage of A.E. Backus and soon found that he could actually make a living selling his artwork, a momentous discovery for any painter, in those days, and in these days as well.  Unsuspecting in the meaning of or the reason for these landscapes, people bought them up like crazy.  And unsuspecting in that these paintings are worth a substantial amount of money now.  They represent not only a time period, but an artistic movement.  And back then, in the 50’s, these brilliant painters sold their work for around twenty-five dollars a piece.  There are art collectors now, willing to spend much more than twenty-five bucks a piece…much, much more.