Show Notes
On this episode of Nuance, Case is joined by Lance Walker, President of Walker & Company Construction. Together they discuss Lance’s business background and his passionate support for the arts. They explore the historical relationship between business and art, and current ways of supporting the art community with business acumen. Case and Lance delve into the history of the Florida Highwaymen, a group of 26 African American artists known for their beautiful Florida landscapes. They explore their humble beginnings and impact on the art world today. Lance also discusses his work with the Orlando Museum of Art and the Winter Park Arts Collective, and the importance of community engagement through art.
Episode Resources:
The Walker Collection: https://www.thewalkercollection.org/
Nuance is a podcast of The Collaborative where we wrestle together about living our Christian faith in the public square. Nuance invites Christians to pursue the cultural and economic renewal by living out faith through work every facet of public life, including work, political engagement, the arts, philanthropy, and more.
Each episode, Dr. Case Thorp hosts conversations with Christian thinkers and leaders at the forefront of some of today’s most pressing issues around living a public faith.
Our hope is that Nuance will equip our viewers with knowledge and wisdom to engage our co-workers, neighbors, and the public square in a way that reflects the beauty and grace of the Gospel.
Learn more about The Collaborative:
Website: https://wecolabor.com/
Get to know Case: https://wecolabor.com/team/
Episode Transcript
Case Thorp
For centuries, businesses and patrons have been indispensable catalysts for artistry in the public square. From the Medici family’s lavish sponsorships that fueled the Renaissance to the far reaching philanthropic projects of industrialists like Andrew Carnegie. The synergy between commerce and creativity has shaped cultural landscapes and sparked innovation. Well today, as our cities look to art to drive conversation and community engagement, the role of business remains crucial and so too does the church and people of faith. By funding public installations, sponsoring performance venues, championing emerging talent, core identities can make sure that the arts continue to thrive and resonate beyond gallery walls, breathing new energy into shared spaces. Well, friends, that’s our focus today as I am glad to interview my friend Lance Walker, who is a leader in the construction industry, but also a great lover and supporter of the arts. Lance, thanks for being with me.
Lance Walker
Good morning, Case. It’s great to be here.
Case Thorp
Yeah, I appreciate it. And I know you’re a big fan of the Florida Highwaymen. I see you’ve got one over your right shoulder there.
Lance Walker
Yep, absolutely. We’ve got quite a few in our collection. I’m sure we’ll get to talk about that here in a few minutes.
Case Thorp
For sure. Well, to our friends and viewers, welcome to Nuance, where we seek to be faithful in the public square. I’m Case Thorp, and I want to encourage you, please like, subscribe, and share. It helps us a lot. Well, let me tell you a little bit about Lance. So he is a dynamic force in the Central Florida creative landscape, blending entrepreneurial savvy with a passion for cultivating the arts. He is a graduate of Auburn University with a degree in business administration. Lance channels his academic foundation into managing Walker Construction, a thriving firm based in Winter Park, Orlando. Lance has a deep appreciation for design and craftsmanship, and they inform his projects from commercial developments to local community spaces. In addition to leading his company, Lance serves on multiple boards including Winter Park Arts Collective and the Orlando Museum of Art. Through his blend of business acumen, and his dedication to the arts, Lance is a vital presence in the intersection between business and artistic expression. Lance, I appreciate you being with us and giving us some time. Let’s just start off with your biography and your spiritual journey. What brings you to where you are today in your career?
Lance Walker
Well, I’m a lifelong Floridian, native-born in Gainesville, and grew up here in central Florida. I went to Winter Park high school. And then I’ve always just worked at my construction company my father founded. You know, my faith journey started in high school and it’s always something that’s kind of guided my path and I just kind of follow the footsteps or follow the path that’s presented to me and see where it leads and it’s always been a faithful journey that’s led me to all different kind of places. And one of them is the love of the arts. I served on the board of trustees at the Walker Art Center, which my great, great grandfather founded up in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It’s one of the top five museums in the country. And also the Orlando Museum of Art, where actually our company Walker and Company constructed the museum back in the mid ‘90s. So that’s a collaboration of the love of art and construction, which kind of led me into like probably 10 years ago starting to collect Florida landscapes that were painted by the Florida Highwaymen.
Case Thorp
Well, we know each other primarily through my wife, who also is a great lover of the Florida Highwaymen. For folks who may not know, tell us who they were and are and why they matter.
Lance Walker
Yeah, so the Florida Highwaymen are a group of 26 African American artists, largely from the Fort Pierce and Gifford, Florida area on the Treasure Coast. Gifford’s just outside of Vero Beach. They painted generally in the mid 1950s and a few are alive and still paint today. They were largely influenced by one of Florida’s most famous regional landscape artists known as Albert “Beanie” Backus. Backus was a white artist in Fort Pierce. His family were boat builders and he was kind of a Renaissance man in that day and age in the Jim Crow era of the Florida South. And he encouraged and influenced young black children, kids from the high school to paint. And so that’s kind of who the Highwaymen are. There’s 26 different artists, one woman. And there’s 26 different unique stories. They’re not all a cohort, although many of them were friends and family. And over the last 60 plus years they’ve created hundreds of thousands of pieces of art, mostly of Florida landscapes that are just really loved by lots of people and very collectible and still cherished today.
Case Thorp
And they are called the highwaymen because they mostly sold their pieces to tourists, right, coming down on the highway.
Lance Walker
Yeah, so interestingly, the term the highwayman wasn’t coined until 1993 by a local art historian from South Florida named Jim Fitch. He was friends with a black artist named Robert Butler, who was from the Okeechobee area. And Robert would tell Jim about these artists he would encounter on the street or selling art out of the trunks of their cars. And every now and then their paths would cross and Jim was intrigued by that. So he and Robert Butler went to Fort Pierce to find out who these artists are and learn more about them. And he kind of loosely identified eight or nine artists and he wrote an article and he coined the term the highwaymen 1993. And then later Gary Monroe, an artist himself, a photographer and a professor at Daytona State College read the article, met with Jim Fitch and went out about to do the research to identify who these artists were and he ended up coming up with 26 artists. So the term the highwayman wasn’t created until the early ‘90s, at which point in time many of the artists were already deceased. So this is not a term that they coined themselves, but they were called the highwayman because they went door to door selling their art or they would travel the highways up and down looking for clients, mostly tourists or middle class patrons that just wanted a nice piece of Florida landscape art they could hang on their wall for 25 or 30 dollars.
Case Thorp
I’ve shared with you there’s a woman in our church whose grandparents owned a motel in Fort Pierce and they bought a number to decorate their many motel rooms. They were affordable and they embodied the culture and looked nice and today she has a large bit of that collection in her home and it’s such a special thing for her to think our grandparents’ motel art turned out to be a real statement in our state. So they often, am I correct, would paint on particle board and other pieces of wood they could find, right?
Lance Walker
Absolutely. Yeah, I think the popular, so because they were struggling young artists and many of them weren’t full-time artists, they had other jobs. I mean, they would do this in their part-time, not all of them. Some of the artists were always artists and still are today, or at least they were up until their death. But they couldn’t afford to go to the art store and buy canvas and traditional paint supplies. So they would use what was called Upson board, which was a wall board about an eighth inch thick that you would buy in a hardware store. They’d get a four by eight sheet of it and they’d cut it into the 24 by 36 or 18 by 24 sizes and that was their canvas, it was a piece of building material. Similarly, they couldn’t afford to buy store-bought frames, so they would buy crown molding or bed molding, and they would miter it, make their own frames, and paint the frames and attach them to their paintings. So literally, from the hardware store to the trunk of their car to the wall of some patron’s house is how they were able to afford to produce the material they needed to paint on.
Case Thorp
We’ll have some links in our show notes so that one can go and get a sense of Florida highwaymen art. They’re Florida landscapes of often the shoreline of freestanding trees like the Jacaranda.
Lance Walker
Jacaranda and the Poinciana tree. So the Poinciana tree is the red and the Jacaranda is the purple. And you’ll see the subject matter repeated numerous times. And a lot of that’s from Backus’ influence. So Backus would invite these young black kids into his studio and many times he would give away the paint materials. He’d give them canvas, he’d give them canvas board, paint brushes and some paint and then set them about their way to kind of to start painting. But Backus’ work was so sought after that they emulated his subject matter, which would be the Breaking Wave, it would be the St. Lucie or St. John’s River, it would be the sunset scenes called the Fire Sky, it would be the Poinciana, because they knew that there was a clientele and a demand for it because Backus created it. So they would emulate this and knew that it was the subject matter that was popular. Now, not every Highwaymen artist and every subject matter was a facsimile of the Backus painting, but generally speaking, the mass of landscape paintings in the subject matter were largely influenced by Backus.
Case Thorp
And he was a landscape architect, correct?
Lance Walker
No, he was an artist. He was a full-time artist. He served in World War II. His family were boat builders, but he was an artist.
Case Thorp
What was his motivation for teaching these young men? I mean, did he get paid for art lessons?
Lance Walker
No, I think he was just a lover of people and at the time it wasn’t popular. He was a jazz musician so I think he would also invite black musicians and there was a group called the Backus Brats and they were like a little quartet of jazz musicians that would play jazz and to him, in the day, he saw people as people. He didn’t divide them by color. And there’s a lot of stories about he and his brother-in-law, James Hutchinson, who was also an artist. They would play music with a lot of the African-American friends in their town in a time when that wasn’t popular. He went to Lincoln Park Academy, which was the black school in Fort Pierce and he asked the art teacher, you know, I do actually kind of want to give lessons to one of your students. So she put forth Alfred Hair, who was the only artist of the Highwaymen to formally take lessons from Backus when he was like 16 or 17 years old. So I think he just loved people. I think he was a renaissance man. I think he had a big heart. And he wanted to inspire young people to follow their passion. And if that was art, then he wanted to support it.
Case Thorp
What about Florida Highwaymen paintings captures your attention? Why their work?
Lance Walker
Well, I think, you know, being a native Floridian, I certainly love the Florida landscape and I spend a lot of time out in the woods or on the ocean or in the lakes and rivers paddling. And so to me, there’s this uniqueness, this primitive kind of natural element to Florida that’s captured in these landscape paintings. A lot of people say they capture the disappearing Florida. Well, if you still get, if you get out there, it’s still there. But a lot of it has been paved over.
Case Thorp
It’s still there.
Lance Walker
But I think it’s just uniquely Florida. And I like the fact that it’s uniquely Florida. It’s all artists from Florida painting Florida scenes. And I think when a lot of the snowbirds would come down back in the 50s and 60s and 70s, they wanted to take a piece of that back home with them. So a lot of the paintings that we find today are from New York or Michigan or Northeast. So you know that it was purchased 50 or 60 years ago and it was a little keepsake or memento that would take them back to the frozen north from their trip to Florida. But I think the fact that it’s a uniquely Florida story to me is important. It’s also a piece of social history. These young black artists trying to make a living doing something other than picking vegetables and picking oranges, which were largely the jobs that were available back in the 50s and 60s. And they found another way to make a living by creating art. And I think that part of linking a beautiful painting to Florida social history also is important.
Case Thorp
Now, as a man of faith, I imagine you have reflected on God the great artist and his role in all of this. Where does your faith intersect with your interest in art?
Lance Walker
I think it’s storytelling really. I think it’s trying to, you know, I’m not the story and I’m not an artist, but I think being able to, you know, walk down a path of meeting these artists, and I will tell you, many of the artists, some now deceased, had very, very strong faith, and we would connect and discuss our stories of our shared faith. And I think, you know, if you think about race relations today and even back then, I mean, one thing that we all have in common is our love of Christ and our faith in God. I think, like Mary Ann Carroll for example, the only female highwaymen artist, I mean, she started her own church. She was the pastor in her church. And she would ask me advice on the building and the refinancing of her church. We were brought together through art, through my love of her art and her passion for creating it, and then our shared faith and some of the other artists too. There’s just this unique common thread that… So I kind of just decided, I’m going all in on this and when you get to meet the people and you get to hear their stories, because every person’s journey is different, but then you come to the same place in terms of our faith journey, it’s a pretty awesome story.
Case Thorp
We are grateful to have several Florida Highwaymen pieces and they just make me more calm. And the reflection on creation reminds me that we have a creator God and it being made in his image as we are, we’re little creators. And like you say, I’m not an artist and you say you’re not an artist in the traditional sense as we think of that, and yet God still calls us to be creative in our work and our relationships and our living of life. And I love to walk by those paintings as I’m going in the house. We have one in our bedroom that I’ll lay there and look at. And it just makes me appreciate God’s largeness and his beauty. Now, being in construction, there’s an artistic element there. You gotta make a building attractive and also usable and economical. Where do you see some of those same gifts and interests carrying over into your work?
Lance Walker
Yeah, I think, while we don’t design the buildings, we help bring that tangible physical building into fruition through somebody else’s vision. And so it’s really taking a vision and then making it three dimensional and bringing that to life. It’s got an end use, which is very important. We’ve built over 50 churches, but we build a lot of housing projects. We build schools. And so, we get to build the places that people live their lives. And I think that’s important. So we take it very seriously. And there’s a passion to that too, to make sure we’re doing a quality project. While you don’t see it when the building’s built, we see our name on the side of that building. It’s built by Walker and Company. And so, you know, it’s a very important part of our legacy, but also, you know, to make sure that we’re creating a quality product that’s in our community that we can all be proud of. And so it’s kind of like art in a way that we’re taking somebody else’s vision and we’re putting down a different piece of canvas that people get to actually live, work, play, and pray in.
Case Thorp
Well, the highwaymen had particle board and you have steel and you’re still bringing into this world things that we need. Now I want to encourage folks to go check out thewalkercollection.org. Thewalkercollection.org. This is where you can see a number of the pieces Lance has collected and you really draw that Florida Highwayman story to what you call Florida self-taught artist. Tell us why self-taught artists are of interest.
Lance Walker
So self-taught artists, as the name kind of implies, are artists that weren’t formally trained and taught themselves to paint. Academics would probably say that self-taught art isn’t really that, it’s art that was created not with the intention to have sold it. It was created as a means to express themselves. Self-taught art is a large umbrella for lots of other types of art, like outsider art, visionary art, folk art. So it’s really original. A self-taught artist created something just based out of this need to express themselves. Not necessarily for commerce to sell, to make a living. And so you really see uniqueness and originality in a self-taught artist, which I think is spectacular. They all develop their own style. They didn’t emulate somebody else’s style. And so I think there is an originality and a uniqueness in self-taught art that I find fascinating. And I have met many of the self-taught artists in our collection and they come from all walks of life. Some are visionary artists. They had a vision from God through maybe some tragedy or some depression or some heartbreak that they used art to heal. They used art to communicate. So a lot of people will look at the art and say it seems somewhat primitive or naive, and maybe it is, but it’s also 100% unique and original. So it’s very appealing to me that they didn’t go to art school and art class. Now, the Highwaymen do kind of fit under the subset of self-taught artists because other than Alfred Hair, they all taught themselves to paint. But they did it specifically for commerce. They did not paint for the need to be creative or original, they did it for survival. They did it because they had to make money. And so I think there’s a unique kind of contrast there between the traditional academic definition of self-taught art and how the Highwaymen fit under the self-taught art umbrella as well. One to express or catharsis in one for economic gain.
Case Thorp
Well, speaking of economic gain, my son Brooks is an incredible athlete, anything he touches, he’s the best. And yet, I want him to be a well-rounded Renaissance man, so I’ve always pushed him into art. And of my three children, he is the most creative. I’m telling you, Lance, every six to eight weeks, he’s got a new project. I want to build a chair, get some wood. I want to do a business, do this, do that. And so I told him, I said, all right, if you will take art in school for a semester, I’ll give you a hundred bucks. Well, his eyebrows lit up. So I said 50 at the beginning of the semester, 50 at the end of the semester. And I’ll tell you, he absolutely loves it. He gets in the car every day and is nonstop about the tactical hands-on things that he’s creating and doing. And that just makes this dad smile.
Lance Walker
Nice. That’s awesome. Well, I had the pleasure of speaking with your other son Charles yesterday. He’s a sharp young man as well.
Case Thorp
Thank you. I completely agree. Now, you also, besides your personal investment in art, serve the community. So Winter Park Arts Collective, Orlando Museum of Art. So you’re a businessman that comes to these boards. What are some of the observations you have? Because you have community leaders from all different sectors coming to the same board. From a business perspective, what are the things that encourage you, what are the things that annoy you, or at least you see, well, my gifts are here to help with that.
Lance Walker
Well, I serve on a number of boards and have and still do. And I think, you know, I think giving back is important. I think trying to be involved with something that you’re passionate about that enhances our community. And so certainly there’s the art that we’ve been talking about. I’m also chairman of the board at ELEVATE Orlando, where we help inner-city youth graduate high school with a plan for the future. And, you know, much of it’s faith-based, the art maybe not so much, but also, you know, trying to bring a different perspective and a different, you know, set of experiences to a board I think is important. You know, my role at the Orlando Museum of Art, is to be on the finance committee and help bring a business mind into a committee that helps steward the resources of the museum. It’s also when it’s available to have connections to be able to present opportunities for exhibitions at the museum. You know, we did the largest highwaymen exhibit in the state of Florida, we sponsored in 2019 at the Orlando Museum of Art. It was one the most successful art openings at the OMA at that time. And it traveled to the Tampa Museum of Art. So part of it is infusing my love of art and storytelling with a venue of which other people can see the art and share it with the public and really try to be a storyteller. And then to see it being embraced also is very gratifying. We’re working hopefully on an exhibit with you at the Orlando Museum of Art, which kind of infuses art and faith, which I think will be really exciting if we can put that together. We’re also working on a new exhibit at the Orlando Museum with a Beanie Backus exhibit. We have some Backus paintings in the permanent collection at the Orlando Museum and hopefully a full-blown exhibit will happen there. But part of it too is really sharing it with the public and having the public have the opportunity to be educated and then celebrate the artists so that it just creates a better awareness and helps them learn their stories. So I think there’s lots of different ways that we get involved serving the community through different boards. A lot of it is faith-based, non-for-profits that are ministries. And some of them, it’s more like, with the museum, it’s more telling stories and educating through art.
Case Thorp
We look back to the centuries of the Church and it was such a patron and still is in some ways. The Protestant Reformation sort of pulled patronage in the arts away a degree from the Church, we started the Arts Fellowship Orlando, which is a fellowship program for artists, but coupled with that is we’ve done some work on patronage, reviving and renewing those with means to think about their role and ability to help make the arts happen and be celebrated. What would you say to fellow business owners? Somebody listening to this who owns a company or is a CEO, why should they engage the arts?
Lance Walker
I think part of it is storytelling, it’s cathartic beauty. I mean, you go to Hobby Lobby and buy some print and decorate your office with it. Or you could, like we have a corporate loan program with the Orlando Museum of Art where we loan work, you know, for a fee. It’s a nominal fee, but it helps create some revenue for the museum. But also it gets the work out of these vaults and out of these storage units and it gets them on the wall so people can see them and appreciate them. And you can rotate them. And I think for many of us that, you know, whether you are creative or not creative, you can certainly appreciate somebody else’s talent when you’re sitting there looking at it. Like when you said, you know, in your house you have some of these highwaymen paintings, but, it’s not just a respect for the talent of the artists, but you know, maybe there’s this just appreciation or this sense of all you get into what the subject matter is. Or maybe it stimulates something more creative if it’s abstract or more modern art, you know, it’s like, well, how can somebody come up with that? So there’s an appreciation of somebody else’s skill set and talent that is different than our own that helps us really grow and expand, I think. I think for other business leaders, whether it’s a financial contribution that helps support art, one of our biggest patrons at the Orlando Museum of Art is our program with school kids. We have thousands and thousands and thousands of school buses that show up and drop kids off so that they can learn more about the art. I had one of the highwaymen come to the Orlando Museum and teach art classes to 30 of our ELEVATE Orlando students. So I had African American students being taught by this famous African American artist who was able to share his life experiences and yet together they all created something that was a painting together. So I think the business community, there’s lots of places to engage and get involved and art’s kind of an easy one because you’re probably not going to walk into an office, a doctor’s office, an attorney’s office, and not see art of some sort. So why not support local regional art as part of that process?
Case Thorp
It wasn’t until this conversation that I learned about the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. So you say 1879, great grandfather Thomas Barlow Walker. Tell us that story, how he came to do what he did.
Lance Walker
So he’s actually my great, great, great grandfather. And I was fortunate enough to have known my great grandfather. So it would have been his grandfather. So he was a big timber baron in the late 1800s in Minnesota. And he loved collecting art. So he would send art dealers over to Europe, buying up art. It wasn’t local regional art. It was old world masters and art from Europe and he amassed this huge collection of art.
Case Thorp
In his home and he was a man of means that could do this.
Lance Walker
Yeah, he was a man of means that had a big art collection and ended up starting his own museum and donating the art to this museum. And I’m not sure about the financial capability, whether he had doubted or not, but it has since grown to be one of the largest and most prominent museums in the country, in Minneapolis, which was started by my great-great-great grandfather. And it’s nice that the Walker Art Center still honors the Walker legacy. And so there are several Walker members that are board members. We aren’t involved necessarily in the day-to-day, but it’s nice to still have that connection and part of our family legacy.
Case Thorp
That’s special. Well Lance, I’m grateful for your investment in the arts. We’ve been a recipient of it by merely by getting to know Florida Highwaymen, but I know others in our community are too. So thank you and thanks for your time right now. I really appreciate it.
Lance Walker
Absolutely, thank you.
Case Thorp
Well, let me encourage you to go and look at thewalkercollection.org to learn more about Lance’s work in the community in his art collection. Thanks for joining us, everyone. Please like and share helps us to get the word out. Leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. You can visit wecolabor.com, wecolabor.com for all sorts of our content. If you give us your email, I’ll send you a 31 day faith and work prompt journal and you can find us across the social media platforms. Don’t forget, Formed for Faithfulness, a weekly 10-minute devotional for the working Christian that follows the liturgical calendar. Many thanks to our sponsor today, the Magruder Foundation. I’m Case Thorp, and God’s blessings on you.
