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Bob Devin Jones salutes Florida’s Highwaymen

As the 20th anniversary of The Studio@620 approaches in June, artistic director Bob Devin Jones is looking, fondly, in the rear view mirror.
His one-act play Further on Down the Road, written and first produced during the venue’s first year, is back Thursday night for a staged reading, in conjunction – just as it was back in 2005 – with an exhibition of oil paintings by some of Florida’s most famous little-known artists.
La Florida, Re-found opened last week; it features original oils by a group from St. Lucie County, in Southeast Florida, now known as the Highwaymen.
The group of 26 African American painters were so dubbed because they sold their brilliantly-colored landscapes out of their cars and pickup trucks along U.S. Highway 1 and A1A in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s. It’s believed that the original Highwaymen created something like 200,000 “canvases” (the reality is that, since stretched canvases were expensive, they painted on thin gypsum board and flat pieces of wood).
Jones’ play tells the Highwaymen story through the eyes of Albert Hair, the group’s de facto leader. “He developed that torqued palm tree, and those popcorn nimbus clouds looking like they were about to burst,” Jones marvels. “And he’s the one who came up with the gypsum boards to paint on, and using wood frame molding for frames.”
It was an era of racial segregation, and of limited opportunities.
Hair, who saw creating these paintings more as a way to make a dollar than an artistic movement (that would come later), was killed in a barroom brawl in 1970, at age 29.
“I liked the fact that Albert was young, gifted and Black when he was martyred,” Jones explains. “And he also inspired a group of people, who didn’t even know they were painters actually, and came up with a Henry Ford kind of assembly-line kind of way. It was a remarkable output that they did.
“And they took Florida all the way to Maine without going there themselves. Because many of their customers were white. And he says in the play that most of their paintings are devoid of people because those northerners didn’t want some black face looking down at them while they’re eating their porridge.”

Painting by Albert Hair (1941-1970).
Original Highwaymen works, especially those by Hair, Harold Newton, Al Black and others from the original groups, are highly valued today. The colors are vibrant, the scenes idyllic and more impressionistic than rooted in reality.
“Their output is what’s so astonishing,” Jones marvels, noting that Hair’s “assembly-line” method allowed the artists to create dozens of paintings in a single day. “And that they’ve now become collectibles is even more so.”
Alfred Hair was inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame in 2004.
“Even if you’re what they call an unsung hero, you’re still a hero to somebody,” Jones says. “He was a hero to all these guys. It’s less documented how or why or what he was, but I think that’s what’s so salient about the story – you can be an inspiration, even when you’re not aware that’s what you’re doing.”
There’s something else, too, equally as inspirational. “It adds to our feelings about Florida. They gave us a very specific vision of this state, and it’s their impressions. And many of those paintings left Florida, so they were promulgating if not the mythology of the state, certainly the bucolic generosity of it.
“Yet at the same time they sold on the road because no gallery would show them.”
For tickets, click here.
