- September 6, 2024
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When you first look at Alfred Hair’s 1960 artwork, “Palms on the Florida Coast,” at the Museum of Botany & the Arts at Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, it’s easy to assume Hair was a practitioner of plein air painting. That means he stood outdoors on a relatively unspoiled beach and captured the scene with his brush and paints.
But that assumption would be wrong.
Why? Because Hair was African American and was not allowed to paint or swim on Florida’s beaches at that time because of Jim Crow laws designed to segregate the races.
Like his fellow painters in the Fort Pierce area who have been dubbed the “Florida Highwaymen,” Hair worked from photographs or scenes in his head. Gallerist Jim Fitch is given credit for coining the term “Florida Highwaymen” in 1994 to describe the African American artists who sold their works out of cars parked along the road.
Unfortunately, we can’t ask the artist, also known as Freddy Hair, about how he drew his inspiration for “Palms on the Florida Coast,” because he died in 1970 at the age of 29 in a bar-room shooting. It was a rough-and-tumble life for the Florida Highwaymen, mostly self-taught artists who painted to survive.
Even though they were originally from Florida’s East Coast, the Highwaymen’s works have been getting a lot of attention in Sarasota as of late.
In January, the city of Sarasota mounted an exhibition in the lobby of City Hall with paintings borrowed from Roger Lightle, a Vero Beach collector who has amassed approximately 700 Highwaymen paintings. The show was refreshed in June and will be extended for another six months.
Back in 2004, 26 of the original Highwaymen artists were inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame in Tallahassee. Only one of the artists was female. Her name was Mary Ann Carroll, and she was known as the “First Lady” of the Florida Highwaymen.
Caroll’s daughter, Wanda Renee Mills, recently gave a talk about her mother’s life at Arts Advocates of Sarasota in the Crossings at Siesta Key mall. She recalled how her mother, in addition to being an accomplished artist, could do everything from fix a car engine to climb a utility pole to turn the power back on.
Marie Selby Botanical Gardens has been down the Highwaymen road before. Three years ago, it held a summer exhibition in the Museum of Botany & the Arts called “We Dream a World: African American Landscape Painters of Mid-Century Florida.”
Sarasota attracts many tourists and retirees to its arts attractions, so it makes sense that there’s a market here for Florida Highwaymen shows even if the group, estimated to have produced more than 200,000 paintings from the 1950s to the 1970s, wasn’t local.
Originally sold for between $20 and $30, the Florida landscape paintings by the Highwaymen dramatically increased in value after the 2001 publication of Gary Monroe’s book “The Highwaymen.” In her Arts Advocates talk, Mills referred to the rapid price appreciation of the paintings as a “gold rush.”
Indeed, the back of a painting on display at Selby Gardens has a price of $10,000, but that isn’t a recent price. Today, Florida Highwaymen paintings can fetch up to $45,000, though bargains can be found in thrift shops and garage sales.
As the title of Selby Gardens’ latest exhibition, “The Florida Highwaymen: Interstate Connections,” indicates, the show links the pioneering artistic work done on Florida’s East Coast with simultaneous efforts to desegregate Lido Beach in Sarasota. “Wade-ins” and other actions helped lead to the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, ensuring the rights of all Floridians to enjoy access to its public beaches.
One room in the Selby museum is dedicated to Sarasota history. It has a mural of the Lido beach wade-ins painted by Ringling College of Art & Design Chief Curator Tim Jaeger on one wall. On another hang photographs of leaders in the efforts to preserve the city’s African American history, such as Vickie Oldham, CEO and president of the Sarasota African American Cultural Coalition.
While efforts to desegregate buses and lunch counters loom large in the retelling of the U.S. civil rights movement, the quiet, persistent efforts of Sarasota’s waders have gone largely unsung. One exception is WEDU’s 2023 documentary, “The Sarasota Experience,” directed by Shaun Greenspan.
On a recent Friday, Walter Gilbert, vice president for diversity and inclusion at Selby Gardens, talked about his memories of the era. He recalled seeing the Florida Highwaymen selling their paintings out of cars on a trip to the Fort Pierce area.
He also remembered how members of Sarasota’s Black churches traveled in a caravan of shared cars (“Most African Americans couldn’t afford to own a car then”) after church and waded into the water at Lido Beach.
The weekly excursions took place for nearly a decade, until the Civil Rights Act was passed. “That’s a long time,” Gilbert noted.
The Sarasota part of the “Interstate Connections” exhibition also celebrates the murals of early African American leaders such as Leonard Reid in Sarasota’s Overtown neighborhood, now called the Rosemary District.
If there’s one reason for making the trip to Selby Gardens for the Highwaymen exhibit, it’s to see Harold Newton’s painting, “Clouds over the Coast,” sitting in the trunk of a sawed-off blue 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air. In the background is a giant reproduction of a 1950s-era postcard of the Causeway Bridge over the Indian River in Fort Pierce. Car buffs are sure to be delighted by the installation.
Although most of the Florida Highwaymen were self-taught, Newton and Hair received training from Fort Pierce painter A.E. “Bean” Backus. He convinced them and others that landscapes had more commercial value than religious scenes.
Selby worked with a custom body shop/salvager in Chicago to create the car installation, said David Berry, chief museum curator at Selby.
The trunk of a red 1958 Plymouth Savoy is filled with the botanical garden’s signature plants. It stands outside Selby’s new visitor center promoting the “Interstate Connections” exhibit.
If you haven’t made it over to Selby Gardens since it opened Phase 1 of its new master plan in January and flipped the switch in June on its new solar array panel to become the first net-positive energy botanical garden complex in the world, the Florida Highwaymen exhibit is a good excuse to go.
If you want to continue down the road with the Florida Highwaymen, put a visit to the Museum of Florida History in Tallahassee on your bucket list. It’s temporarily closed due to renovations, but will reopen in 2026.
There’s also a notable collection of the Fort Pierce artists’ works at the Smithsonian’s Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. It has 18 Florida Highwaymen paintings.
Be careful, though. Some collectors of Florida Highwaymen art can’t stop once they get started. The bold brush strokes and vivid hues of unspoiled Florida beaches and lush tropical flora are known to create intense feelings of happiness — and desire.
Florida Highwaymen artworks with livestock roaming in the countryside are in demand, says Berry, most likely because these scenes aren’t as frequently found in real life, as ranching and farming gives way to development.
Collectors of Florida Highwaymen paintings are known to become experts on various artists’ painting styles, materials and frames. To transport their works while the paint was still drying, artists created frames made from repurposed molding that could be easily stacked in the trunk of a car without damaging the art.
The Florida Highwaymen rabbit hole is a deep one.
