the highwaymen - bio · like the rest of the highwaymen, she ... the mid-1960s one highwayman, al...

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when the cop stopped jamesGibson on the highway and asked why

he, a black man, was driving such a nice

car, Gibson gamely opened the trunk

of his Chevy and showed him his paint-

ings of the Florida landscape. The po-

liceman was so impressed with the ver-

dant images and vibrant colors that he

bought two before sending the young

man on his way.

It was Florida in the early 1960s, a

spectacular vacationland that was ex-

periencing a real estate boom. While

tourists frolicked in the surf, the less

Starting in the 1950s, a group of self-taughtartists picked up palette knives and tubes ofpaint to create luminous landscapes of boomingsouthern Florida. With no gallery to showtheir work, they took it on the road.

HIGHWAYMENThe

Lush dreamscapes by

Livingston Roberts

(left) and James

Gibson. These two and

those that follow are

undated and untitled.

2 6 A M E R I C A N L E G A C Y FA L L 2 0 0 5

By ELIZABETH HOOVER

FA L L 2 0 0 5 A M E R I C A N L E G A C Y 2 7

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Above and top right,

two Floridas by Mary

Ann Carroll, a marsh

at sunset and a stormy

seashore. Bottom right,

by Al Black, a lonely

stretch of highway, not

surprisingly, a

recurring theme for the

painters.

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privileged, including many of the state’s

African-Americans, toiled in turpentine

distilleries, orchards, and lumber mills.

Gibson, who was born in 1938 and lived

in segregated Fort Pierce, avoided that

fate. He was a member of a group of

about 30 highly motivated and talented

black painters who sold their work along

Florida’s east coast—the Highwaymen.

As sit-ins across the state sparked race

riots and Ku Klux Klan terrorism, an un-

usual friendship grew between a couple

of young African-Americans and a suc-

cessful white landscape painter named

Albert Backus, who lived in Fort Pierce.

In 1954 Backus, who was in his late for-

ties, met Harold Newton, a self-taught

black artist, and persuaded him to try


ings in 24 hours. He recalled, “We were

young and competitive; painting was ex-

hilarating. We would get together and

paint for days, inspiring, motivating, and

laughing with one another.”

Their preferred medium was oils, their

tools were palette knives, their canvas

an inexpensive building material made

of compressed fiber, which they primed

with shellac. On these boards they re-

created their surroundings: the turbul-

ent sea, graceful herons in tranquil la-

goons, trees dripping with Spanish moss.

One of Hair’s apprentices remembered

being told to look at nature as if “the

truth lies beyond the horizon.”

The paintings were thenloaded into someone’s car, some-

times even before they were dry,

and sold for 5 to 30 dollars apiece in

parking lots, on beachfront boardwalks,

or to the owners of the hundreds of new

buildings going up along U.S. 1. One

painter, Willie Reagan, described their

schedule as “painting on Monday, Tues-

day, and Wednesday, framing on Thurs-

day, selling on Friday and Saturday . . .

sometimes Sunday.” Despite the frenetic

pace and concern with sales, they were

committed to their craft. Rodney Demps,

whom Hair hired to do preliminary work

on the skies, said, “Alfred made those

panels come alive. . . . He had a lot of tal-

ent, a lot of talent. He was gifted.” Liv-

ingston Roberts insisted, “I wanted to be

landscapes. A year later, at the urging of

his high school teacher, 14-year-old Alfred

Hair showed up at Backus’s studio. There

he learned to mix and apply paint, quick-

ly mastering these skills and using them

to develop his own style. Backus had an

agent to promote his painting, but Hair

and Newton decided the best place to

sell their own work was alongside the

roads in and around Fort Pierce.

Hair, who dreamed of becoming a mil-

lionaire, realized that no one would pay

much money for paintings by a black

man, so he decided to make many of

them and sell them cheap. He built an

industry in his yard, working on 10 to 20

paintings at once, and later employing

his wife and in-laws as salespeople. His

speed gave Hair’s work a dynamic, mus-

cular quality, bright reds slashing across

a molten sky. Newton hewed closer to

Backus’s influence, with balanced com-

positions and a more limited palette.

By the early 1960s friends of Hair and

Newton, seeing their success, were eager to

learn how to paint. They regularly gath-

ered in Hair’s or Newton’s yard, learning

the skills, working into the night, drink-

ing beer, and eating barbecue. Spurred by

good-natured taunts, they tried to best

one another’s output. Hair reportedly did

exercises to build up his strength so he

could paint faster. James Gibson, who,

encouraged by his family, had painted

since he was a teenager, claimed to be the

most prolific, once completing 100 paint-

TO

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Above: TKTKTK TKTK

TKTKTKTKTKT TKT

TKTKTK. At right,

James Gibson paints

outside his Florida

home.

a good painter, one of the best.” They

also wanted to make enough money to

avoid taking menial jobs, and for the

most part they succeeded.

Mary ann carroll metHarold Newton in the late

1950s. She was a single mother

in Fort Pierce doing whatever she could

to make ends meet—cleaning house, cut-

ting grass, and even installing ceiling fans.

One day she noticed a car painted with

flames and, admiring the handiwork,

struck up a conversation with its owner.

He told her about his painting, and she

started visiting his house. “Everybody

gather up and shoot the breeze,” Carroll

recalled. “Somebody says they can paint

better or paint faster.” Soon she was the

only woman in his group. She was a bit of

an outsider, but Newton nurtured her.

“He always had time,” she remembered.

Her work stands out for its clarity; elegant

white trees stretch bare branches into a

saturated sky. Unlike the dense canvases



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of her fellows, her paintings are radiant

with empty space, glowing skies, and still

water.

Like the rest of the Highwaymen, she

brilliantly captures a mythical Florida, a

lush fantasyland of cool breezes, exotic

birds, and palm trees, on a distinctly

human scale. Rather than the distant,

sweeping vistas of most traditional land-

scape art, the Highwaymen painted views

the eye could capture in an instant. In the

words of Gary Monroe, the author of The

Highwaymen: Florida’s African-American Land-

scape Painters, their oils “yielded a kind of

tabula rasa into which new Floridians can

read their own dream landscape. Their

colors aren’t accurate or serene but end

up being a perfect metaphor for what

people think about Florida and believe

Florida to be all about.”

Their success also came from their unique selling style,

which was as energetic and spon-

taneous as their art. They sometimes

traveled 130 miles south to Miami, know-

ing they needed to sell at least enough

paintings to buy the gas to get back. In

the mid-1960s one Highwayman, Al Black,

emerged as the group’s smoothest and

most successful salesman and its unoffi-

cial agent, working on commission. After

asking permission, he would spread out

paintings on the floor of a new bank or

office building. He recalled his sales pitch:

“ ‘Good morning, I’m Al Black, one of

the artists from Fort Pierce that do the

Florida landscape. I want to know if you

would be interested, if it wouldn’t take up

too much of your time.’ . . . If a housewife

looked interested in a certain painting,

I’d tell her, ‘Ma’am, you got good taste;

that’s the most expensive of them.’ ” Al-

though most of the buyers were white,

the mix of original paintings and smooth

salesmanship made the artists exempt

from the hostility and suspicion many


At left and top, lagoons

primeval and

haunting, by Willie

Daniels and James

Gibson.

blacks experienced in 1960s Florida.

Painting proved lucrative for the High-

waymen into the 1970s, but then the

group started to disintegrate. On August

9, 1970, Alfred Hair, who had taught so

many young painters, was murdered at a

Fort Pierce juke joint. Hezekiah Baker,

who had already left painting to sell

insurance, recalled, “There was nothing

to shoot for after Alfred died.” Hair had

galvanized the other painters who had

gathered in his yard to soak up his energy

and advice, and he had been living proof

that a black man could make it as an

artist. Some continued, but those who

struck out on their own found that police

had begun enforcing nonsolicitation laws

and demanding vendor’s licenses.

Their painting style changed, too, as

some, to be more like the formally trained

Backus, began using grids rather than

sketching from memory, as they had done

before. People stopped buying their

paintings, and they drifted back into

their day jobs as truck drivers, day la-

borers, and art teachers. Harold New-

ton died in 1994 after suffering a stroke.

In the early 1990s jim fitch,now a curator at the Museum of

Florida Art and Culture, in Avon Park,

began searching for these artists’ work.

Fitch had known of the itinerant paint-

ers, but as he culled pieces from flea mar-

kets and yard sales, he realized how re-

markable they were. In 1994 he coined

the term “Highwaymen” to describe the

16 remaining painters from the Fort

Pierce group. Mary Ann Carroll reacted

negatively to the term at first, because

she thought it made them sound like

“crooks and robbers.” Not to mention

that they weren’t all men. But, as Gary

Monroe notes, “You couldn’t ask Madison

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Below, Mary Ann

Carroll, and a serene

and delicate landscape

typical of her style.

Avenue for a better moniker.”

After Monroe published his book, in

2001, interest exploded. Current High-

waymen no longer need to travel; art col-

lectors come to them. Larger paintings

can fetch $10,000, and James Gibson has

sold some for as much as $18,000. Gov-

ernor Jeb Bush hung paintings of Gib-

son’s in the Florida Governor’s Gallery

in 2003, declaring, “I’m a big fan of his

work. He can capture Florida in just a

few brush strokes.” And in 2004 the

Highwaymen joined Backus as inductees

in the Florida Artists Hall of Fame.

People are still drawn tothese paintings because of their

unique style, which enlivens land-

scape tradition with vigorous brushwork

like that of the Abstract Expressionists.

“Crusty, rich, thick paint put down intui-

tively,” says Fitch. An isolated patch of

an Alfred Hair painting can be an abstract

musing on the nature of red, but then

you pull back to see a woman struggling

with her laundry in the wind. The red

of her sheets echoes the brilliant flow-

ers of a flame tree and appears again in

fallen petals on the ground, pulling the

composition to the right, while on the left

a creamy sky promises calmer weather.

Mary Ann Carroll’s works radiate like

Mark Rothko color-fields, with layered

blacks sliding into delicate oranges, but

they also evoke a land of immense beauty.

She still tries to paint every day, and she

remains rooted in observing her sur-

roundings. She says, “I can see things and

they inspire me, and it just opens up like

a book.” She has come to accept the name

Highwaymen and enjoys the continued

interest in her work. “I hear people use

the word phenomenon, whatever that is. But

it really was a great happening,” she says.

She modestly concludes, “It was an hon-

est dollar for an honest day’s work.” —

Elizabeth Hoover’s article on Inman Page(“Pathfinders: The Education Champion”) ap-peared in the Spring 2004 issue. B

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AIR


Alfred Hair, above,

captured a windy day

of blowing clothes and

blossoms falling from a

brilliantly vermillion

tree. He created such

scenes mostly from

memory, with no

preliminary sketches.

the highwaymen - bio · like the rest of the highwaymen, she ... the mid-1960s one highwayman, al...

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