By Coral Gables Gazette staff

Somewhere in the galleries of the Coral Gables Museum this Saturday, a child will stop in front of a painting of the Everglades — the light going gold across the sawgrass, the water dark beneath a bruised sky — and ask who made it. The answer is one of the most important stories in Florida art, and it begins in a Fort Pierce boat workshop in the years after World War II.

Family Day on Aragon, the Coral Gables Museum’s free monthly program for families, returns Saturday, March 21, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at 285 Aragon Avenue. This month’s edition is organized around a daylong exploration of the museum’s current exhibition featuring the work of Albert Ernest “Beanie” Backus, the Fort Pierce painter known as the dean of Florida landscape art — and as the man whose open studio door helped launch one of the most remarkable art movements in American history.

The painter who changed Florida art

Backus was born in Fort Pierce in 1906, largely self-taught, and spent more than half a century painting the Florida he saw around him: the Everglades at dusk, the St. Lucie River in morning light, the sea-island landscapes he encountered during his Navy service in the South Pacific. He was inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame and his paintings hang in private and institutional collections across the country. He became known as the ‘Dean of Florida Landscape Painters,’ and no other 20th-century artist captured the Florida light quite like Backus.

But the story that gives the Backus exhibition its deepest civic resonance is not what he painted. It is who he taught. In Fort Pierce during the 1950s, Backus kept an open-door policy in his studio, where locals — Black and white alike — gathered during the Jim Crow years to listen to jazz, share stories, and make art. Among those who came to watch and learn were a 14-year-old named Alfred Hair and a 19-year-old named Harold Newton, both African American artists from Fort Pierce. Backus persuaded Newton to paint landscapes rather than the religious scenes he had been working on. He gave Hair formal instruction in painting. Hair and Newton’s involvement in painting soon attracted a group of young, energetic artists who painted large quantities of brilliantly colorful impressionistic landscapes that they sold from the trunks of their cars.

That group became the Florida Highwaymen — 26 African American painters whose fiery skies, Spanish moss, and luminous Florida rivers are now recognized as one of the last great American art movements of the 20th century. The 26 original artists of the Highwaymen were inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame in 2004. Every one of them traces a line back to the open door of Beanie Backus’s studio.

That is the story a child following the Backus scavenger hunt at the Coral Gables Museum will begin to encounter on Saturday, moving through galleries hung with glowing sunsets and winding waterways, looking for the light source in each painting, noticing the difference between Backus’s Florida and the Jamaica he painted during his travels. The scavenger hunt is designed to make looking active rather than passive — to turn the gallery into a question rather than an answer.

A full day of making and doing

The scavenger hunt runs throughout the day, but the museum has built a program of scheduled activities around it that moves from making to moving to thinking to listening.

From 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., TMP — a teen-led volunteer and education initiative — leads artmaking workshops connecting youth with architecture, urban design, and visual arts. TMP’s model is distinctive: teenagers designing and facilitating the experience rather than receiving it, which means the workshop reflects the way young people actually think about making things.

At 1 p.m., Miami Royal Ballet and Dance brings a one-hour program for children ages 6 to 12: a 35-to-40-minute movement workshop open to all experience levels, followed by a short live performance featuring young dancers from the company. The session is led by Maia Duschatzky, a professional dancer and instructor whose work emphasizes foundational technique and expressive movement in equal measure.

At 3 p.m., the CGM Chess Club returns with a structured introduction to the game designed for beginners. No prior experience is required. The session covers basic rules, introductory strategies, and guided gameplay — the kind of session that takes a child from knowing nothing about chess to being able to play a game in under an hour.

At 4 p.m., the MISO Chamber Series closes the afternoon with a free concert by members of the Miami Symphony Orchestra. The program is a deliberate bridge between the classical repertoire and the songs a family might actually know: Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik alongside arrangements of La Vie en Rose, Viva la Vida, I Will Always Love You, Eleanor Rigby, Billie Jean, and Yesterday. The chamber setting turns familiar songs into something different — stripped of production, reduced to the sound of musicians playing together in a room.