The Walker Collection of Florida Self-Taught Art celebrates a unique group of Outsider Florida artists and their artworks. Education plays a significant role in our mission, along with increasing national and international exposure for these artists. Their stories and backgrounds are essential for understanding their motivations and accomplishments, so we address their empowering profiles and histories.
The Walker Collection of Florida Self-Taught Art collaborates with non-profit institutions and art museums by lending artworks, subsidizing lectures and facilitating publications.
What is the Walker Collection?
While A.E. "Beanie" Backus was not actually a Florida Highwaymen artist, he mentored and provided homage to many. Read more about him.
While not Highwaymen, these Florida artists have a similar style and folk feel. Learn more about them.
THE HIGWAYMEN
The Highwaymen, a group of African Americans isolated in a rural town in the Jim Crow South of the late 1950s, began to paint optimistic and colorful landscapes of the era’s mainstream dreams of a life amidst tropical beauty that would surely, someday, reward effort. Selling this promise in arrangements of wind-swept palms, billowing cumulus clouds, the seas, and setting sun, 25 men and one woman periodically left their backyard studios and took to the highway, visiting businesses and homes where they sold their works, respectfully, to white customers.
They embodied the tenets of American entrepreneurship, tenacity, and courage, forging a unique path to equality and freedom. In the process, they showered the Sunshine State with their versions of Paradise, and the paintings came to represent Florida as a state of mind–where people came to realize new hopes in a new era. Their glowing images were far beyond tourist art; they were the landscape of the American Dream, and Florida was the place people imagined when they dreamed of a post-war future of family and comfort.
The Highwaymen have been lauded as Florida heroes; they were inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame. In 2001, The New York Times wrote about their reemergence, and more recently, they were the subject of a three-part National Public Radio piece. The story of how these unlikeliest of artists rose above societal expectations to create a cultural phenomenon is beginning to reverberate far and wide.