Richard Mayhew, Abstract Artist Who Painted Hazy Visions of the World Around Us, Dies at 100
by Maximilíon Durón
Richard Mayhew, who was known for his hazy abstract paintings that at times resembled landscapes, died on Thursday at the age of 100.
Throughout his life, Mayhew was often identified as a landscape painter, but he eschewed that title, correcting people by telling them that he was, in fact, a mindscape painter. “Because when I go to a canvas, I just put paint on there and it’s suggestive, it’s very suggestive,” he explained in a 2019 oral history as part of the Getty Research Institute’s African American Art History Initiative. “Since I’m involved with the feeling of desire, ambition, love, hate, fear—that’s my paintings. It takes on that kind of structure and imagery.”
He added, “I use landscape as a metaphor to express emotion. That’s it.”
Mayhew’s mindscape paintings have an ethereal quality to them, in which swaths of color blend into each other. At times, they are electric shocks of violet, magenta, neon green, pink, and goldenrod, resembling negatives for color photographs. In other canvases, they are hazier tones of the same shade that bleed into each other. Bodies of water and forests of trees and bushes emerge from some canvases; others are wholly abstract, perhaps suggesting a horizon line or the crashing of a wave.
In an interview with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, he recalled visiting a former plantation in Georgia. He noticed a large bushy area on part of the grounds and he wondered to himself what took place in that area and how the enslaved people who labored on the plantation were treated. “So I did a painting of that area, based on just a feeling. I wanted to get real involved with emotional interpretation,” he said. He would often say that he was “painting forty acres and a mule,” a reference to the promises made to formerly enslaved people after the Civil War that were never fulfilled.
He added, “There’s a certain mystique in the shadow underneath of a bush. There’s this little area of feeling which is representative of almost every possibility.”
As part of a tribute to celebrate Mayhew’s 100th birthday published by Culture Type, artist Lisa Corrine Davis, who met Mayhew in 2018, said, “Richard has painted believable but non-existent landscapes that speak to identity through notions of space as a way of understanding the world. He recognizes that space is deeply connected to the Black experience—spaces we can be in, spaces we are left out of, and spaces that were taken away. Richard’s landscapes are not observed and preserved, but built and invented, one mark at a time, existing only in his mind’s eye.”
Mayhew, however, may be best known for his affiliation with Spiral, a collective of African American artists that formed in 1963 at the height of the civil rights movement and disbanded after mounting their only group show in 1965. The group consisted of 14 men, including Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, Hale Woodruff, and Charles Alston, and one woman, Emma Amos; Felrath Hines had invited him to join after seeing his work. The impetus behind the forming of Spiral was for the artists to discuss issues directly affecting Black artists. Mayhew was the last surviving member of the group and the only one to not participate in a 1966 roundtable discussion, published in ARTnews, about the group.
“It was a think tank [of] all African American artists,” he said in the SFMOMA interview. “It was involved with debating and challenging the system and also challenging each other. … we took on the challenge of the community in New York at the time, which did not include Afro-American artists in the various major exhibitions and galleries. And Spiral was part of the instigators of this time to challenge the system of the arts.”
Richard Mayhew was born in 1924 and raised in Amityville, New York. The community of artists out on Long Island served as an inspiration for a young Mayhew who began drawing and painting at a young age, with a local artist serving as his art teacher beginning when he was 14. During his youth, he was a frequent visitor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, studying the works of European and American masters held in the institution’s collection.
In the GRI oral history, Mayhew said his ancestry was a mixture of African American and Native American, including Shinnecock and Cherokee-Lumbee, but he often didn’t identify as the latter for much of his life “because every time I mentioned [being Native American], it was rejected. So I lived my life as African American,” he said.
Later in life, Mayhew would say that his desire to paint within a landscape mode came from both parts of this ancestry. “That combination is why I paint landscape as nature, probably,” he said in the SFMOMA interview. “In terms of Afro-American and Native American, their blood is in the soil of the United States.”
Mayhew served in the Marines during World War II and was eventually awarded the Special Congressional Medal of Honor. (His first wife, Dorothy Zuccarini, who passed away in 2015, was “the one who discovered and pursued Rick’s right to be awarded” the medal, according to a preface to the oral history by their daughter, Ina Mayhew.)
After his service, he spent time in Europe, visiting the continent’s various museums, with stops in Paris, Amsterdam, and Germany. He moved to New York upon his return to the US in 1947, at the age of 23. Around this time, he began his formal education in art history and art-making, taking courses at Columbia University, the Brooklyn Museum School of Art, and Pratt Institute, as well as the Art Students League, though he wasn’t officially enrolled there. Among his teachers during this era were American painters Edwin Dickinson and Reuben Tam. Mayhew received his first solo show at the Brooklyn Museum in 1955.
Mayhew would further his studies in Europe in the late ’50s and early ’60s, first by winning a John Hay Whitney Fellowship in 1959, which funded a year of studies at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence, and then receiving a grant from the Ford Foundation, which allowed him to stay in Europe, where he also studied at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
Mayhew also began teaching early on his career, which would become a life-long dedication. He taught at the Brooklyn Museum School of Art and the Art Students League, where he studied, as well as at Smith College and Pennsylvania State University. He taught at Penn State for 14 years, retiring in 1991 as a professor emeritus.
When Mayhew moved to New York, Abstract Expressionism was on the rise and he did hang out at the Cedar Bar, an Ab-Ex watering hole, with many of the artists before they became famous. While his artistic mode certainly embraced some of the elements of the movement, Mayhew never fully embraced total abstraction. (A more important influence on him was George Innes, a 19th-century Tonalist painter.)
“It reached a point where everything is eliminated,” he said of Abstract Expressionism in the GRI oral history. “Everything’s eliminated, and you go back to starting from nothing. What do you have but nothing? Symptomatic of what’s going on in the world right now. It’s a symptom of destructivism and how one can avoid that and find a norm, so that the norm is of the past.”
Like many Black artists of his generation, Mayhew had an uneven relationship with the mainstream art world. The Whitney Museum, for example, only has one work by the artist, a 1960 painting that it acquired in 1962. Despite receiving grants to study in Europe, being inducted into the National Academy of Art in 1969, and being a part of Spiral, he was not canonized in many accounts of postwar American art history.
It was only recently that his work has been reevaluated and embraced. The first monograph of his work was published only in 2020. He last had a retrospective in 2009 that was spread across three Bay Area venues: the de Saisset Museum, the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), and the Museum of Art & History in Santa Cruz. (He had relocated to the Santa Cruz area from the East Coast by this point.) In 2020, SFMOMA devoted a gallery to his paintings, six of which had been donated by Pamela Joyner, an ARTnews Top 200 Collector and SFMOMA trustee who has long championed his work. He was the subject of a 40-painting survey at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art in California last fall.
“Richard Mayhew’s legacy lies not only in his mastery of color and landscape but in his ability to transcend the physical world, evoking emotion and cultural memory,” ACA Galleries president Dorian Bergen said in a statement. (ACA Galleries is the former representative of Mayhew. The artist’s work is currently represented by Venus Over Manhattan gallery.) “His work is a spiritual journey, capturing the essence of nature as a reflection of the African American and Native American experience, enriching our understanding of identity and place. He will be deeply missed.”
But color became a central focus of Mayhew’s practice, which he continued well into his 100th year. Venus Over Manhattan will open a show focusing on Mayhew’s watercolors, spanning the past three decades including new work, on November 7 in New York. His bold use of color can often be discombobulating, searing your retinas even. The colors vibrate in ways that can be difficult to put into words. Over the course of more than eight decades, he had mastered how to manipulate the eye with his use of color, he has said. “Color became a very sensitive part of my development,” he told SFMOMA. “How it affects one’s emotions. I think you can’t just look at a painting and see one thing. There’s this other element going on by the use of color and how one’s eye is caught up in the after image.”
He added, “What does love look like? What color is it? What does fear look like? What color’s fear? All my paintings are based on emotion.”