September 04, 2025
On view
Addison fall season features 2025 Hayes Prize, Florida, and family portraitsThis fall the Addison Gallery of American Art will present Making Their Way: The Florida Highwaymen Painters. The exhibition explores the improbable story and prodigious output of the Florida Highwaymen, an amorphous group of primarily self-taught African American artists who forged often lucrative careers as landscape painters against the backdrop of racially segregated Jim Crow Florida. The majority of the nearly 100 paintings are on loan from the collection of Jonathan Otto ’75, P’24, ’27. The exhibition, which will run from September 9, 2025 through January 4, 2026, will be one of the first of its kind in the Northeast and will introduce new audiences to this underrecognized chapter of American art history.
Hailing largely from the communities of Fort Pierce and Gifford along the Atlantic coast of Florida, the Highwaymen produced hundreds of thousands of expressive and shockingly vibrant landscape paintings that captured the rapidly disappearing natural beauty of their region from their emergence in the late 1950s through the early 1980s. Denied access to gallery representation and excluded from the mainstream art world, the Highwaymen painters adopted a model of itinerant distribution, peddling their riotous, often rapidly produced oils, almost always still wet and priced to sell at around $25, on average, wherever they could—door-to-door, in doctor’s offices, bank lobbies, and shops—or to road-tripping tourists out of the trunks of their cars parked on the side of the interstate.
"We are proud to showcase the work of the enterprising Florida Highwaymen painters and to tell their remarkable story," said Allison Kemmerer, The Mary Stripp and R. Crosby Kemper Director of the Addison. "This exhibition highlights not only their artistic talent but also their determination in the face of adversity. These artists viewed their paintings as an economic lifeline and a tool of resistance and resilience.”
“The Highwaymen painters built on a tradition of American landscape painting that traces its roots back to the nineteenth-century tropical Floridian fantasias of artists like Winslow Homer, George Inness, Martin Johnson Heade, and Thomas Moran,” added Gordon Wilkins, Robert M. Walker Curator of American Art and curator of the exhibition. “The Highwaymen reinvigorated the form, bringing fresh energy and an unrestrained color palette to bear on otherwise conventional scenes of swaying palm trees, polychrome sunsets, and breaking waves. Their exuberant art fundamentally shaped popular perception of the Sunshine State and provides lasting documentation of Florida’s disappearing natural paradise.”
Following its debut at the Addison, the exhibition will travel to The Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, Pennsylvania.
Generous support for Making Their Way: The Florida Highwaymen Painters has been provided by Bernard I. Lumpkin and Carmine D. Boccuzzi and the Arthur and Vivian Schulte Exhibitions Fund.
Also on View at the Addison this Fall
Captive Lands (September 9, 2025–January 18, 2026)
Organized in dialogue with Making Their Way: The Florida Highwaymen Painters and consisting of works drawn almost entirely from the Addison’s rich permanent collection, Captive Lands offers varied frameworks with which to engage with the complex and often fraught histories of the lands now known as the United States. Unfolding over five distinct sections, this exhibition is not based on one unifying thesis or a single cohesive narrative. Instead, each gallery offers visitors the opportunity to reflect on the American landscape through a distinctive lens grounded in the overarching, expansive theme of capture.
Generous support for this exhibition has been provided by the Sidney R. Knafel Fund.
Hayes Prize 2025: Tommy Kha, Other Things Uttered (September 2–January 25, 2026)
Hayes Jr. Prize exhibition, Tommy Kha, Other Things Uttered is the first museum solo show of photographer Tommy Kha (b. 1988). With a humorous and poignant touch, Kha examines how we construct belonging and otherness through photography. Often incorporating masks and cardboard cutouts as stand-ins for his own body, Kha’s work invents new models for self-portraiture with a critical eye toward the medium’s long history of absences and erasure. Growing up in Memphis, Tennessee, as queer, Asian American, and the child of immigrants, Kha had often been made to feel he was different.
Now the artist locates a place for himself, both within the American South and the tradition of photography.
This exhibition is sponsored by the Addison Artist Council (AAC), AAC Founder-level member Jason S. Tyler, (PA 2001), and the Edward E. Elson Artist-in-Residence Fund.
Family Portrait (September 2, 2025–January 4, 2026)
To complement Hayes Prize 2025: Tommy Kha, Other Things Uttered, the Addison is presenting Family Portrait. This exhibition features photographs from the Addison's collection—ranging from 19th-century daguerreotypes to contemporary snapshots—to explore how artists have engaged with one of photography's most enduring subjects: the family. These works reveal photography's unique capacity to capture both the particular and the universal aspects of family experience, as well as how the medium itself becomes a powerful form of preservation against the passage of time.
Family Portrait is generously supported by the Winton Family Fund.
Playing to Our Strengths: Highlights from the Permanent Collection (September 2, 2025–July 31, 2026)
Playing to Our Strengths is the second exhibition in a series exploring particular strengths of the Addison’s renowned collection of art of the United States from the 17th century to the present day. This iteration juxtaposes two distinct tendencies in American art during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The first gallery explores the “ideal,” bringing together Impressionist paintings with Pictorialist photography. The second gallery confronts the “real” through works by artists of the Ashcan School and social realist photographers. Together, these works reveal how American artists of the era grappled with questions of beauty, truth, and the rapidly transforming character of modern life.
Generous support for this exhibition has been provided by the Mollie Bennett Lupe & Garland M. Lasater Exhibitions Fund.
Top Image: Tommy Kha, Assemblies I (Or Me Crying in Three Takes), Greenpoint, Brooklyn, 2020. Archival pigment print. © Tommy Kha
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