highwaymen - Elizabeth Hoover

The
HIGHWAYMEN
Starting in the 1950s, a group of self-taught
artists picked up palette knives and tubes of
paint to create luminous landscapes of booming
southern Florida. With no gallery to show
their work, they took it on the road.
when the cop stopped james
Gibson 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 paintings of the Florida landscape. The policeman was so impressed with the verdant 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 experiencing a real estate boom. While
tourists frolicked in the surf, the less
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A M E R I CA N L EG ACY FA L L 2 00 5
Lush dreamscapes by
Livingston Roberts
(left) and James
Gibson. These two and
those that follow are
undated and untitled.
PHOTO CREDIT
By ELIZABETH HOOVER
PHOTO CREDIT
FA L L 2 00 5 A M E R I CA N L EG ACY
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A M E R I CA N L EG ACY FA L L 2 00 5
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 unusual friendship grew between a couple
of young African-Americans and a successful white landscape painter named
Albert Backus, who lived in Fort Pierce.
In 1954 Backus, who was in his late forties, met Harold Newton, a self-taught
black artist, and persuaded him to try
OV E R L E A F: L E F T—— I M A G E C O U R T E SY O F L I V I N G S T O N R O B E R T S ; R I G H T—— I M A G E
C O U R T E SY O F J A M E S G I B S O N . T H I S PA G E : T O P L E F T A N D T O P R I G H T—— I M A G E S
C O U R T E SY O F M A RY A N N C A R R O L L ; B O T T O M —— I M A G E C O U R T E SY O F A L B L A C K .
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.
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, quickly 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 millionaire, 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, muscular quality, bright reds slashing across
a molten sky. Newton hewed closer to
Backus’s influence, with balanced compositions 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 gathered in Hair’s or Newton’s yard, learning
the skills, working into the night, drinking 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-
ings in 24 hours. He recalled, “We were
young and competitive; painting was exhilarating. 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 recreated their surroundings: the turbulent sea, graceful herons in tranquil lagoons, 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.”
he paintings were then
loaded into someone’s car, sometimes 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, Tuesday, and Wednesday, framing on Thursday, 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 talent, a lot of talent. He was gifted.” Livingston Roberts insisted, “I wanted to be
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FA L L 2 00 5 A M E R I CA N L EG ACY
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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.
ar y ann c arroll met
Harold Newton in the late
1950s. She was a single mother
in Fort Pierce doing whatever she could
to make ends meet—cleaning house, cutting 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
Above: TKTKTK TKTK
TKTKTKTKTKT TKT
TKTKTK. At right,
James Gibson paints
outside his Florida
home.
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A M E R I CA N L EG ACY FA L L 2 00 5
T O P : I M A G E C O U R T E SY O F W I L L I E D A N I E L S ; B O T T O M : D O N B A R T L E T T I / L O S A N G E L E S T I M E S
M
heir success also came
from their unique selling style,
which was as energetic and spontaneous as their art. They sometimes
T
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A M E R I CA N L EG ACY FA L L 2 00 5
I M A G E C O U R T E SY O F J A M E S G I B S O N
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 landscape 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 Landscape 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.”
At left and top, lagoons
primeval and
haunting, by Willie
Daniels and James
Gibson.
traveled 130 miles south to Miami, knowing 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 unofficial 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.’ ” Although most of the buyers were white,
the mix of original paintings and smooth
salesmanship made the artists exempt
from the hostility and suspicion many
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before. People stopped buying their
paintings, and they drifted back into
their day jobs as truck drivers, day laborers, and art teachers. Harold Newton died in 1994 after suffering a stroke.
n the early 1 9 9 0 s 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 painters, but as he culled pieces from flea markets and yard sales, he realized how remarkable 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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B O T H , C O U R T E SY O F M A RY A N N C A R R O L L
Below, Mary Ann
Carroll, and a serene
and delicate landscape
typical of her style.
blacks experienced in 1960s Florida.
Painting proved lucrative for the Highwaymen 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
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A M E R I CA N L EG ACY FA L L 2 00 5
eople are still drawn to
these paintings because of their
unique style, which enlivens landscape tradition with vigorous brushwork
like that of the Abstract Expressionists.
“Crusty, rich, thick paint put down intuitively,” 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
P
with her laundry in the wind. The red
of her sheets echoes the brilliant flowers 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 surroundings. 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 honest dollar for an honest day’s work.” —
Elizabeth Hoover’s article on Inman Page
(“Pathfinders: The Education Champion”) appeared in the Spring 2004 issue.
B O T H , C O U R T E SY O F T H E E S TAT E O F A L F R E D H A I R
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.
Avenue for a better moniker.”
After Monroe published his book, in
2001, interest exploded. Current Highwaymen no longer need to travel; art collectors come to them. Larger paintings
can fetch $10,000, and James Gibson has
sold some for as much as $18,000. Governor Jeb Bush hung paintings of Gibson’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.