Gary Monroe, Professor of Visual Art at Daytona Beach Community
College, will present "The Highwaymen: Transcending Poverty," to illustrate
how art can change lives and empower
people through self discovery.
The group of self-taught
African-American artists, now known as the Highwaymen
because of their marketing techniques, developed an artistic style that came
to be appreciated among wide and varied audiences. Most of these artists
learned by observing their mentor, A. E. "Bean"
Backus of Fort Pierce, who came to be known as the dean of Florida landscape
painters.
The Highwaymen present a "case study" of the power of the arts and
humanities to extricate disenfranchised people from
the "surround of force," which keeps people poverty
stricken. Alfred Hair, the only Highwayman who took formal instruction from
Mr. Backus, with an entrepreneurial spirit, organized most
of the others to mass-produce Florida landscape paintings.
These young African-American painters rose above
societal expectation in the 1950s and 1960s by
marketing more than 50,000 of their stylistic Florida
landscape paintings from their cars throughout the state
.
With a strong sense of
camaraderie, the Highwaymen
made their way out of poverty more profound by
creating the visual legacy of our time and
place.
Mr. Monroe is a member of the
Florida Humanities Council Speaker's Bureau and author of The Highwaymen:
Florida's African-American landscape Painters
(University Press of Florida, 2001). This presentation will include
a slide show and group discussion. The venue will be the Wells'Built Museum of
African-American History and Culture located in the Parramore neighborhood.
Parramore is an Orlando inner city neighborhood largely
populated by educationally and economically disadvantaged African-American
families.
