Painter, famed Florida Highwaymen member U. of Miami professor, pacemaker pioneer
James Gibson, one of Fort Pierce’s famed Highwaymen painters, has died. He was 79.
Noted as one of the most successful of the self-taught African-American artists who traveled U.S. 1 in the 1950s and ’60s selling their artwork from the trunks of their cars, Gibson died of a heart attack Tuesday, his sister Shirley Gibson said.
He consistently made a living selling vibrant paintings of the Sunshine State’s landscapes, from the signature royal poinciana to palm tree-lined beaches. As recent as March, he attended an annual gathering of the artists in Pompano Beach.
When they were youngsters, their mother would play Mahalia Jackson spirituals early in the morning and James Gibson “would just start stroking with his brush,” his sister said.
And he continued that routine up until his death, she said.
“He enjoyed going to church,” Shirley Gibson said. “And he loved the Lord.”
His key to success, according to his biography on the “Florida Highwaymen” web page, was to “respect people, don’t give up, and put God first.”
“Everything else,” he “will fall into place.”
Gibson was born in Moore Haven, the first of his parents’ eight children. The family moved to Fort Pierce when he was a toddler.
He went to Tennessee State University, where he majored in biology but had to drop out after two years because he couldn’t afford the tuition.
It was in his early 20s that Gibson started making money from his paintings and decided to make it his life’s work.
The artists got their nickname because they sold quickly painted works, sometimes still wet, while traveling up and down Florida’s said, coast. They used painting to escape the tomato fields and orange groves during segregation.
Their works hang in homes across the United States, as well as in the White House, in city halls and museums.
Of the original 26 artists, 17 are still alive, according to the “Florida Highwaymen” web page.
Gibson is survived by his son Jamie, daughters Dawn and Kim, several grandchildren and his sisters Shirley, Dianne and Bernice and a brother Freddie.
A funeral service is scheduled for Aug. 26 at Greater Mount Pleasant Primitive Baptist Church in Fort Pierce.
Rather than send flowers, the family asks for contributions to their Mother Bernice Gibson’s scholarship fund. The money helps children attend college. The scholarship’s address is P.O. Box 3272, Fort Pierce, FL 34948.
Dr. Agustin Castellanos, the only child of an international authority on children’s heart conditions who was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize, made his own mark in cardiovascular research.
His nearly 60 years of study and accomplishment would lead the University of Miami professor of medicine to co-develop pacemakers that are now common.
At 63, in 1990, he also found himself on the Colombian island of Gorgona, where he joined an international team of scientists to shoot darts at humpback whales to obtain electrocardiograms useful for human heart research. For cardiologists, the view afforded by a whale’s heart, which is structurally similar to a human’s but 4,500 times larger, was akin to studying a human heart through a microscope but with more detail. The group hoped to learn how to treat arrythmias that can cause heart attacks.
By the time Castellanos, Tino to friends, retired in 2011, he’d racked up a slew of honors from institutions including UM, the American Medical Association and the Cuban Medical Association in Exile.
“Dr. Castellanos contributed immeasurably to the field of electrocardiography and clinical bedside electrophysiology, and will be remembered nationally and internationally for all that he contributed. He was the intellectual idea-person who stimulated his colleagues and students to think creatively,” said Dr. Robert Myerburg, professor of medicine and physiology at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.
Castellanos, born in Havana to pediatric cardiologist Dr. Agustin W. Castellanos and his wife Angela Sanchez de Castellanos, died Aug. 9. He had Parkinson’s disease and atrial fibrillation, said Maria Castellanos, his wife of nearly 66 years. Castellanos was 89.
The quest for medical knowledge begun in Cuba in 1925 by his father, who developed in the late 1930s the angiocardiogram used today to detect heart disease, turned into a dynasty.
Castellanos graduated from the University of Havana School of Medicine in 1953. His early research, begun in Havana and continued when he emigrated to the United States in 1960, focused on electrical forces generated by an infant’s heart.
He completed an internship at UM/Jackson and joined its faculty as an instructor in medicine in 1962. He earned recognition for his clinical cardiovascular research focusing on electrocardiography - recording the electrical activity of the heart - and cardiac electrophysiology - the study of the electrical properties of cells and tissues.
In 1965, along with fellow UM cardiologist, the late Dr. Louis Lemberg, he co-developed the implantable “demand” pacemaker, now known as the VVI pacemaker. These devices, along with another of his developments, the AV sequential or bifocal pacemaker, gained traction because they pulse only when the heart fails to beat on its own. Earlier pacemakers tended to cause arrhythmias because they competed with the heart’s beats.
“There was no greater teacher than Tino Castellanos,” Myerburg said. “His former trainees during his years on the faculty benefited greatly from his knowledge.”