MUSEUM & CULTURE
A.E. Backus Museum & Gallery
St. Lucie County · Atlantic Coast
The Fort Pierce museum of A.E. Bean Backus, the painter who taught the artists who became the Florida Highwaymen.
ABOUT THIS PLACE
Albert Ernest Backus, known as Bean, painted Florida for fifty years and left something near 5,000 works behind when he died in 1990. He worked mainly from the 1940s through the 1960s, painting rivers, hammocks, lakes and beaches, which means his canvases record a Florida that largely no longer exists. He was inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame. His larger mark was on other people. In a segregated town he took young Black painters into his studio and taught them, among them Alfred Hair and Harold Newton, and what they developed from his manner became the style of the Florida Highwaymen, who painted fast and sold their work from car trunks along the highways because galleries would not take it. The museum at 500 North Indian River Drive holds his originals with the story set out beside them, and it mounts an annual Highwaymen exhibition and weekend each February
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