Around The River Bend, A Flood Of History

Jacki Lyden — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 19:18:00 +0000

The Bark River is my backyard, childhood river. And yet, in a lifetime of travel, I'd never explored it.

I knew it carved the land from the Ice Age to settlement times, from the Black Hawk War of 1832 (in which young Abraham Lincoln appears) to the era of grist mills. But the Bark also flows past impressive Indian mounds.

The Landscape Art Legacy Of Florida's Highwaymen

Jacki Lyden — Sat, 22 Sep 2012 20:40:00 +0000

If you traveled by way of Florida's Route 1 in the '60s and '70s, you might have encountered young African-American landscape artists selling oil paintings of an idealized, candy-colored, Kennedy-era Florida. They painted palms, beaches, poinciana trees and sleepy inlets on drywall canvases — and they came to be known as the Highwaymen. The group made thousands of pictures, until the market was saturated, tastes changed, and the whole genre dwindled.

Roadside Innovation

The story of the Highwaymen is one of beauty and heartbreak.