Culture · A Critic at Large
The Speed of Sunset
How twenty-six self-taught Black artists painted their way into Florida’s mythos.
In the late nineteen-fifties, along the margins of US Highway 1 in Fort Pierce, a group of young Black artists began producing landscapes with a speed that startled the formal art world. Denied access to traditional white-owned galleries, these painters, who would later be known as the Highwaymen, used their car trunks as showrooms, selling fresh canvases directly to tourists and motel owners. They painted on cheap Upson board, using fast-drying oil paint and house painters' brushes to capture the humid wilderness of the Indian River Lagoon. Their style was swift, expressionistic, and born of economic necessity; a painting completed in forty minutes could be sold for twenty dollars before the sun went down.
What they captured was a version of Florida that was already slipping away under the weight of postwar suburban development. While the state was busy constructing planned communities and golf courses, the Highwaymen painted wild royal poinciana trees in violent orange blooms, lonely sand roads winding through live oaks, and monochromatic gray swamps under a threatening sky. Their sunsets were impossibly red and bruised, reflecting a landscape that was both a paradise and a crucible. These were not faithful botanical illustrations but emotional impressions of a tropical frontier, rendered with a raw energy that was highly sophisticated in its simplicity.
To view their work today is to understand how a landscape can be transformed into a collective cultural memory word by word through sheer repetition. Thousands of these paintings once hung in doctor's offices, real estate lobbies, and living rooms across the state, defining the visual identity of Florida for a generation of newcomers. After decades of neglect by cultural institutions, their work has now migrated to major museums, where scholars debate the brushwork of Alfred Hair and Harold Newton. The irony of this elevation is that the paintings were meant to be transient, decorative objects, designed to dry in the breeze of a speeding station wagon.