The New York Times

Richard Mayhew, Painter of Abstract Landscapes, Dies at 100

He drew from his Black and Native American heritage, as well as his own memory, to find an emotional resonance behind the beauty of nature.

By Alex Williams

Richard Mayhew, a painter of Black and Native American heritage who was known for his explosively colorful abstract landscapes — he called them “mindscapes” — that traced the emotional contours of nature as well as his forebears’ historical relationship to the land, died on Sept. 26 at his home in Soquel, Calif., on the northern coast. He was 100.

His death was confirmed by the Venus Over Manhattan gallery in New York, which represents him.

In his early years as an artist in New York City in the 1950s and ’60s, Mr. Mayhew, a Long Island native, intersected with two midcentury art movements: Abstract Expressionism, which upended the very concept of what a painting could be, and the Spiral Group, a small but influential New York collective of African American artists that sought a new Black aesthetic.

Although he mingled with the likes of Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline at the Cedar Bar (later Tavern) in Manhattan, a de facto headquarters for the Abstract Expressionists, he came to reject the movement’s push beyond representational imagery. When “everything’s eliminated,” Mr. Mayhew said in a 2019 oral history for the Getty Trust, “you go back to starting from nothing.”

Instead, he turned to a traditionalist genre, landscape painting, which was more fashionable in the mid-19th century than in the mid-20th. But his approach was hardly traditionalist. His landscapes contained elements of the abstract, often relying on an explosion of Day-Glo colors bleeding into each other to form dreamlike tableaux.

“While the paintings are subtly familiar, a sense of mystery and the unknown pervades them,” Mikaela Sardo Lamarche, the director of ACA Galleries, wrote in the catalog to an exhibition of Mr. Mayhew’s work there in 2020. “These are not real, physical locations, nor do they stand still in time. The canvases are imbued with the glow and ebb of light, and delicious saturated colors synthesize to create shifting light patterns that imply the passage of moments in time and changing seasons.”

John Canaday, an influential art critic for The New York Times, described Mr. Mayhew in 1966 as a “nature poet.”

“What I do with landscapes,” Mr. Mayhew said in a 2020 interview with the culture site Hyperallergic, “is internalize my emotional interpretation of desire, hope, fear and love. So, instead of a landscape, it’s a mindscape.”

Native Americans had a deep bond with nature “because they survived and lived very well, a very healthy existence until the Europeans came,” he said in a 2021 interview with the San Francisco Museum of Art, which presented a full-room exhibition of his work that year. As for his Black ancestors, he said, “their blood is in the soil of the United States.”

“I’m painting 40 acres and a mule,” he added, alluding to the government’s broken promise of reparations for enslaved people after the Civil War.

Mr. Mayhew was born on April 3, 1924, in Massapequa, N.Y., on Long Island’s South Shore. He was one of two sons of Alvin Mayhew, a house painter who was part Shinnecock, a native people of eastern Long Island, and Lillian (Goldman) Mayhew, who was of Black and Native American heritage.

His mother, he said in an interview with The Times last year, was a “flamboyant city girl” who had spent a lot of time in Manhattan, leaving him in the care of his maternal grandmother, who versed him in his Indigenous heritage.

Richard began drawing and painting at an early age, and after his parents separated, he spent a lot of time with his mother in the city, where he visited museums and encountered the work of the great masters, including those of the Hudson River School, a group of New York landscape painters of the mid-19th century who glimpsed a divine element in the beauty of nature.

George Inness was a particular favorite. “There’s a mystique in his work, there’s like a melody of sensitivity there,” Mr. Mayhew once said. “It’s like the dew on a leaf.”

Mr. Mayhew served in the Marine Corps during World War II, rising to the rank of first sergeant. After the war, he traveled through Europe, visiting the great museums, and returned to the United States in 1947.

For a period, Mr. Mayhew performed as a jazz singer. He studied art at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and took classes at Columbia University. He later began a long teaching career, including positions at the Art Students League of New York in Manhattan and the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and received a John Hay Whitney fellowship to study in Europe.

By the late 1950s, Mr. Mayhew was receiving solo exhibitions in New York. In 1961, his profile got a major boost when his painting “Morning Bush,” a brooding image of a dark shrub against a gray sky, was included in the Whitney Annual (now Biennial) at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

He became involved in the Spiral Group in 1963. It was founded by the Black artist Romare Bearden and others in anticipation of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom that August, when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech.

The group, while short-lived, included artists from multiple disciplines seeking to explore the role of the Black artist in a segregated society and what the novelist Ralph Ellison called a “new visual order.”

“It was a think tank” of “all African American artists,” Mr. Mayhew said in the SFMOMA interview. “It was involved with debating and challenging the system and also challenging each other.”

Despite its core mission, Mr. Mayhew said, Spiral was “not just about Afro-African sensibility; it was about the consciousness of creative thinking, which is universal.”

Critics, too, saw his work transcending racial categories. In a review of “Contemporary Black Artists in America,” a 1971 exhibition at the Whitney, Mr. Canaday praised Mr. Mayhew, writing that his “peaceful landscapes have nothing to do with whiteness or blackness or anything except art, and this at an admirable level.”

Mr. Mayhew’s teaching career included stops at Smith College and Pennsylvania State University, where he remained for 14 years, starting in 1974. His work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, among others.

He is survived by his wife, Rosemary Mayhew, whom he married in 1994 after his divorce from his first wife, Dorothy, who died in 2016, and his children from his first wife, Ina and Scott Mayhew.

Although Mr. Mayhew became famous for his landscapes, he was not one to prop an easel on a lush hillside overlooking a glistening brook. He did his work in a studio, relying not on photographs or sketches but on “imagined” memories of scenes from his travels.

“I just put paint on the canvas,” he once said, “and that’s suggestive of what will emerge.”