Highwaymen Artists Alfred Hair and son, Kelvin Hair

Highwaymen artist has work displayed at Florida Capitol for Black History Month | Photo Gallery

By Jan Lindsey

Monday, February 13, 2012

A couple of art shows are coming up, but second-generation Highwaymen artist Kelvin Hair doesn't have any work to show.

The 15 canvasses he might have contributed are instead going on display at the Florida Capitol through March 29. Gov. Rick Scott chose Hair's work to honor as part of Black History Month.

"I was floored," said Hair, who also is a lieutenant with the St. Lucie County Fire District.

Hair has been with the fire department for more than 25 years and oversees Station 2 on Seaway Drive on Hutchinson Island.

"To me it's a wonderful way to work helping people and being paid," Hair said. "When you have someone who has coded, which means you're clinically dead, and they (later) walk into the fire station with tears in their eyes and they say, 'You guys saved my life,' ... You walk away with a total respect for this job."

Hair's love of doing for others also is evident in the free art classes he provides for underprivileged children.

"I make more money selling my artwork than I would teaching a class," for pay, Hair said. But he gives his time in the hope it will help children build better lives or help them escape, at least for a moment, things that are unpleasant in their world.

Art also is an escape for him.

"Nothing else around you seems like it is there ... you get so involved in it," Hair said of painting.

The result of that focus are paintings, often of Florida flora, that Hair said he sells for about $5 a square inch. That price might stun his father, Alfred Hair, who — as one of the original Highwaymen — sold paintings for $25 or $30 dollars at the side of the road in the 1950s and '60s, a time when galleries and art shows were not open to black artists.

Even then, Alfred Hair made with one painting what a farmworker made in a week.

"The Highwaymen have gotten — in Florida — to be a household name," Hair said. "I am a very good artist, but I am where I am because my dad paved the way for me."

http://www.tcpalm.com/news/2012/feb/13/highwaymen-artist-has-work-displayed-at-florida/