Renowned landscape painter Richard Mayhew died last Thursday, September 26 at the age of 100 at his home in Soquel, California, as confirmed by Venus Over Manhattan Gallery and ACA Galleries in New York City. Informed by the intertwined history of his Black, Lumbee, Cherokee, Montaukett and Shinnecock ancestry, Mayhew developed abstract landscapes he called “mindscapes” or “moodscapes,” where vibrant colors meet raw emotions and spirituality is indistinguishable from the natural world.
The artist was born in 1924 to Alvin Mayhew and Lillian Goldman Mayhew and grew up in Amityville on the south coast of Long Island. His paternal grandmother, Sarah Steele Mayhew, cared for him as a child and fueled his connections to Shinnecock culture, which he would continually draw on throughout his practice. By the age of seven, Mayhew had also developed a relationship with the visual and performing arts, showing an interest in jazz music, coastal music and plein-air painting and masterpieces at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Mayhew moved to New York City in 1947 as the Abstract Expressionism movement was rapidly gaining momentum, and took courses at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, the Art Students League, and the Pratt Institute. These influences formed the basis for his softly diffuse but hyper-saturated landscape paintings, in which colors reflect harmoniously with each other.
In a 2021 interview Working with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Mayhew explained that “African American and Native American blood runs in the soil of the United States,” connecting him to the land both physically and spiritually.
His first solo exhibition, at the Brooklyn Museum in 1955, was well received, and his second two years later at the Morris Gallery met with equal critical success. Mayhew was awarded the John Hay Whitney Scholarship in 1959, which funded a one-year scholarship to study at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. He continued his stay in Europe with support from the Ford Foundation and found inspiration in French Impressionism.
Mayhew returned to New York in 1962, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. He joined Spiral, an African-American artist collective co-founded by Romare Bearden, Charles Aston, Hale Woodruff, and Norman Lewis that focused on the role of black art in social change.
In addition to his painting practice, Mayhew taught at the Art Students League, the Brooklyn Museum, Smith College, and finally Pennsylvania State College, where he taught for fourteen years before retiring in 1991 and moving to Soquel, just outside Santa Cruz. , California. In 1969 he was inducted into the National Academy of Art.
Mayhew celebrated his 100th birthday on April 3 at the Museum of African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco, that organized a traveling retrospective spanning more than 50 years of his career in 2009. In addition to the continued support of MoAD, the artist has works in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the National Gallery. of the arts, among other institutions. The artist’s first posthumous exhibition, dedicated to his watercolors in particular, will take place on November 7 at Venus Over Manhattan.
Intuition guided Mayhew’s brushes across the canvas; he painted while thinking about his life, his lessons and his subconscious.
“What I do with landscapes is internalize my emotional interpretation of desire, hope, fear and love,” the artist said Hyperallergic in 2020. “So instead of a landscape, it’s a mental landscape.”
Mayhew is survived by his second wife Rosemary, daughter Ina Mayhew and son Scott Mayhew.
