Gallery Talk: The Florida Highwaymen: A Legacy of Landscape Painting

The Malden Public Library will present a gallery talk with Roger Lightle, owner of Highwaymen Art Specialists in Vero Beach, Florida. Lightle started collecting works by “Highwaymen” artists 26 years ago. He has curated the annual Backus Museum Highwaymen Exhibit for over 10 years, as well as curating other Highwaymen exhibitions throughout Florida and the United States. He will share the interesting, surprising, humorous and important stories that shed welcome light on the lives and works of these worthy artists.

The talk will be held at the library on Friday, September 19, at 3 p.m. The talk honors the generous gift of three new works to the library’s permanent art collection by Highwaymen artists: Harold Newton, Sam Newton and Alfred Hair.

The Highwaymen painters created careers as landscape painters against the backdrop of racially segregated Jim Crow Florida. Denied access to gallery representation and excluded from the mainstream art world, they sold their art works wherever they could — including out of the trunks of their cars parked on the side of the interstate.

Widely hailed as the most talented of the Florida Highwaymen painters, and often referred to as “the original Highwayman,” Harold Newton (1934-1994) is the artist who, along with Alfred Hair, is credited with founding the group of painters who came together in Fort Pierce, Florida, to make and sell their work. Unable to show his work in many of the whites-only galleries, Harold Newton transformed his car into a mobile gallery, selling his art directly to people around Florida (often along Route 1). Harold Newton was inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame in 2004 and the Smithsonian permanent collection in Washington, D.C., in 2016.

The Highwaymen artists depicted the state’s scenic coastline and wild backcountry, often in dazzling combinations of color and tone. These artists’ works are very much part of the lineage of European and American landscape painting that stretches back to the nineteenth century. They learned the basic skills of landscape painting from the renowned artist A.E. “Beanie” Backus, who welcomed both Newton and Hair into his studio. The Highwaymen paintings follow in the legacy of other important landscape artists in the Library’s collection, including Joseph M. W. Turner, Frederick Watts, George Innes, George Loring Brown and Thomas Hill.

Following the program, light refreshments will be served. The Malden Public Library’s Converse Memorial Building & Art Galleries are located at 36 Salem St. in Malden. Gallery Hours: Wednesday, 2-4; Saturday, 2-3, or by appointment. Call 781-324-0218 or access in**@*****************ry.org.

This exhibition is made possible by the generous donations of John Giso and funds from the Estate of Wilfred J. Carr & the Trustees of the Malden Public Library.