The Florida Highwaymen

This exhibition brought together a major selection of work created by the Florida Highwaymen, an artist group composed of 26 African-American landscape painters that formed during the 1950s in Fort Pierce, Florida. Their careers took shape during a time and in a place where pursuing a career as an artist presented an alternative to working in citrus groves and labour camps. Denied access to private galleries due to segregation, the Highwaymen made a living selling their work door to door and from their cars along Florida’s eastern coastal roads A1A and US 1. Collectively, their work stands at the crossroads of innovation, entrepreneurship and personal-political resilience. 

  
The Highwaymen’s remarkable use of colour can be read as a form of escapism from the melancholic cultural landscape that defined the Jim Crow (segregated) South. By introducing this vibrant palette, the artists fashioned an entirely new mode of landscape painting, one with an irreducible and necessary social consciousness. The seemingly neutral image of the empty coastal landscape is granted a spectacular, almost extraterrestrial quality; each work becomes an emblem of longing, pointing to a fictional harmonious place that exceeds the here and now. The Highwaymen simultaneously looked toward and beyond nature to imagine a new American life. 
 
Despite the striking originality of their work, the Highwaymen are often denied entry into the traditional canon of Western art history. This exhibition addressed the problem of visibility by highlighting their distinctive artistic approach in relation to the social, cultural and political context in which it first emerged. Although this project remains the largest of its kind, as well as the first to be presented in Canada, the works on view made up only a small fraction of the group’ s total output, which is estimated to be anywhere from 250,000 to 400,000 paintings over a 60-year period. 

Presented by the Embassy of the United States in Ottawa and LPM Projects in collaboration with Galerie SAW Gallery

Special thanks to Tony Hayton for generously lending works from his collection for this exhibition and for his longtime dedication to preserving the Florida Highwaymen’s legacy