SUPPORTS AFRO-NATIVE AMERICAN ARTISTS FEBRUARY FEATURE: RICHARD MAYHEW Angela Jackson DES MOINES, IOWA – As a local custom frame retailer and art gallery, The Great Frame Up in West Des Moines enjoys supporting the visual arts. This month we introduce readers to Richard Mayhew, an Afro-Native American landscape painter and arts educator. His abstract landscapes are created with the richness of color and depth of feeling acquired through the artists’ lifelong journey as an African American and Native American. Richard Mayhew’s love of jazz and the performing arts is also reflective in his artistic expression. His signature style includes brightly colored abstract landscapes. Richard Mayhew lives and works in Aptos and Santa Cruz, California. EARLY LIFE & EDUCATION Richard Mayhew was born in 1934 in Amityville, New York to Native American and African American parents. He received formal training at Columbia University, NY, Academia Florence, Italy and at the Art Student League of New York he studied with artist Edwin Dickinson. Later while attending Brooklyn Museum Art School he studied with Reuben Tam. CAREER HIGHLIGHTS Richard Mayhew is a well-respected art educator. Professor Mayhew taught art at numerous universities, including Pennsylvania State University, PA, Hunter College and Smith College in NY and Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. Professor Mayhew visited Paris in 1961, having just spent two years in Florence on a John Hay Whitney Fellowship, and lived for a time in Holland before returning to the United States. Primarily a landscape painter, Mayhew has also organized and participated in multimedia performances and directed community outreach arts programs. In the 1960’s Mayhew painted landscapes in close tonal harmonies and gradually diffused recognizable forms until they disappeared entirely in his paintings of the 1970’s. Since 1975, however, he has driven across the United States five times to observe the mood and space of the American landscape, and now, working with an intensified palette, Mayhew recreates an exuberant sense of vast space within the canvas. INSPIRATION Richard Mayhew is a founding member of Spiral, a collective of African-American artists and painters group in the 1960’s in New York that included Romare Bearden, Charles Alston, Norman Lewis and Hale Woodruff as members. E&S Gallery opined, “Richard Mayhew has created distinguished landscapes that are not limited to one section of the country. Even in their most abstract renderings, his paintings are unmistakably landscapes, evoking the work of George Inness and, in their fleeting illusionary light, that of Henry O. Tanner. Mayhew’s paintings are derived from an intimacy and absorption with nature and our relationship to it, achieving mystery and beauty in combinations of color that are as surprising as they are evocative. Richard Mayhew represents, in some respects, a bridge between the older black artists who developed through the WPA in the 1930’s and those who, after World War II, attended art schools and matured in the 1960’s amid the turbulent Civil Rights Movement and the rise of Abstract Expressionism.” Continued on page 11 8
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