Florida Highwaymen Painters Alfred Hair and Harold Newton Featured in New Spady Museum Exhibition April 15, 2009

From April 15 through June 30, 2009, the Spady Cultural Heritage Museum in Delray Beach will present a special collection of Florida Highwaymen paintings, rarely displayed for the public. The exhibition focuses on paintings of two of the original Florida Highwaymen painters, Alfred Hair and Harold Newton. The exhibition is entirely from the private collection of Scott Schlesinger, a Fort Lauderdale-based attorney and collector of Florida art.

An opening reception will be held May 7 from 5:30-7 p.m. at The Spady Museum, in conjunction with a new Delray Beach jazz concert event that will be held on Northwest Fifth Avenue that evening. Members of the Spady Museum are free; non-members are $5. For more information, call 561-279-8883.

The so-called “Florida Highwaymen” are a group of African-American painters from the Fort Pierce region, who were either self-taught or were taught by and originally worked under or with Alfred Hair. The paintings these artists produced dramatically depict Florida’s natural landscapes with heavy doses of color, puffy pink clouds and windswept palms. Their paintings were made quickly, employing palette knives and large brushes with visual formulas calculated to appeal to buyers decorating the growing number of suburban offices and homes during the 1960s and early 1970s. Working the coastal highway corridors from the Space Coast to Miami, they sold thousands of paintings out of the trunks of their cars, earning the “Highwaymen” name.

While the number of “official” Highwaymen painters may be debated by collectors and Fort Pierce locals, The Highwaymen, Florida’s African-American Landscape Painters author Gary Monroe puts the number at 25 men and one woman. Monroe followed up his 2001 book with Harold Newton, The Original Highwayman in 2007.

What distinguishes both Newton and Hair from the other Highwaymen is their direct contact and influence from A.E. “Bean” Backus, a successful regional painter based in Fort Pierce, who gave lessons to the younger Hair and befriended and counseled Newton on his painting career. There is little argument that Highwaymen paintings borrow directly from Backus’compositions and reliance on the color and drama of Florida’s winter skies. Against the backdrop of the Jim Crow south, Backus was seemingly color-blind and sympathetic to the plight of the hard-working African-Americans in the racist and race-divided community of Fort Pierce.

This exhibition borrows the Hair and Newton focus from a recent exhibition, Highwaymen Newton & Hair, The American Dream in the Sunshine State presented at the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale in 2006. That exhibition featured many works from the Scott Schlesinger Collection and was accompanied by a catalogue with an essay by Gary Monroe. The Fort Lauderdale catalogue and Gary Monroe’s three Highwaymen books will all be available for sale at the Spady Museum during the exhibition.

With “African American Painters: The Florida Highwaymen, Alfred Hair and Harold Newton,” the Spady Museum presents numerous examples of both Newton and Hair’s works including examples from both artists’ early careers. Newton’s early works are painted with a palette knife yielding a textural “painterly” style. Later in his career, he tightened his style and brushwork with thinner smoother applications of paint. Hair, whose career was cut short when he was murdered in a bar in 1970, painted more quickly, in larger scale and more formulaically than Newton. The exhibition also includes examples from both artists of paintings with human subjects, a somewhat rare aspect of Highwaymen paintings since most are pure landscapes.

The Spady Cultural Heritage Museum, a non-profit organization located at 170 NW 5th Avenue in Delray Beach, is dedicated to discovering, collecting and sharing the African-American history and heritage of Florida. Located in the former home of the late Solomon D. Spady, the most prominent African American educator and community leader in Delray Beach from 1922 to 1957, the museum opened in July 2001. It is the only museum of its kind in Palm Beach County. For more information, call 561-279-8883 or visit www.spadymuseum.org