The Grio

Acclaimed artist Richard Mayhew dead at 100

After decades of sharing his diffused visions of the world, abstract artist Richard Mayhew died on September 26.

by Haniyah Philogene

On September 26, 2024, acclaimed artist Richard Mayhew died at 100 years of age. Known for his hazy depictions of landscapes, Mayhew became known for his “mindscapes” and “moodscapes,” a style merging representations of the world and emotions. 

“I’m a mindscape painter. I’m not a landscape painter…because when I go to a canvas, I just put paint on there and it’s suggestive, it’s very suggestive,” Mayhew said in 2019, explaining the thought process behind his artistry. “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. I use landscape as a metaphor to express emotion.” 

Born in 1924 in Amityville in Long Island, New York, Mayhew developed an affinity for the visual arts at a young age. Under the care of his grandmother, Sarah Steele Mayhew, the young artist frequently visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, took art classes, and discovered connections in his ancestry. Possessing Black and Native American heritage, Mayhew said his ancestry inspired his choice to paint landscapes because “in terms of Afro-American and Native American, their blood is in the soil of the United States,” per ARTnews. 

After serving in the Marines during World War II and spending time in Europe, Mayhew returned to New York in 1947. At 23, he began his semi-formal education, taking classes at Pratt Institute, Columbia University, the Brooklyn Museum School of Art, and more, without fully enrolling in any of these institutions and eventually taking his studies abroad.

While Mayhew built his own notoriety, he is primarily recognized for his affiliation with Spiral, a mid-century collective of Black artists. Founded in 1963 at the peak of the civil rights movement, the group included Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, Hale Woodruff, and Charles Alston and served as a space to discuss the issues faced by Black artists and showcase their art. 

“It was a think tank [of] all African American artists,” he added. “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.”

Mayhew’s work lives on, with permanent exhibitions across the country at the Art Institute of Chicago; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.