Florida Highwaymen Exhibit

Description

With bold colors and confident brushstrokes, the roadside paintings of the Florida Highwaymen captured the spirit and natural scenic beauty of Old Florida at a time when segregation prevented them from showing their work in their local galleries. An exhibition of this work will be shown at the Pensacola Museum of Art February 21- March 17, 2012. In an era marked by racism and poverty, the Florida Highwaymen, a group of 26 African-Americans, broke convention and escaped life of manual labor to paint beautiful, iconic landscapes. Starting in the mid-1950s, these self- taught entrepreneurs mentored each other while they painted basic, improvised materials such as Upson board for canvasses and used crown molding and other scrap wood for frames. Most of the Highwaymen lived in Fort Pierce or other nearby small towns in South Florida. Unable to show in local galleries, the entrepreneural spirit drove the Florida Highwaymen to sell their art from car trunks along area roadways, giving the group its name. This exhibition will be drawn from private and public collections.