In response to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Charles Alston, Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, Richard Mayhew, Hale Woodruff and other black artists founded the Spiral Group (1963-1965) to discuss how whose art could keep up with growing demand. for civil rights in the United States. A year later, following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act (1964), officially ending segregation. The shortcomings of the civil rights law, however, were not lost on Bearden and Lewis, prominent black artists whom the mainstream art world continued to ignore. In 1969, knowing they would have almost no opportunity to show their work in New York, the two artists, along with Ernest Crichlow, founded Cinque, an artist-run gallery that exhibited more than 450 artists of color over the course of of its 35 years of existence. In opening the Cinque Gallery, Bearden, Lewis and Crichlow recognized the existence of at least two distinct artistic worlds in New York, a situation which has not completely changed.
One artist who was at the forefront of both groups was Mayhew, a black-Native American painter whose brilliant canvases have yet to receive the recognition in New York they have long deserved. While he has exhibited regularly in Manhattan galleries for many years, cultural institutions there have almost completely ignored him, even as they begin to pay attention to unsung artists of color. Mayhew has not been embraced by the art world primarily because the trajectory he has followed has no overt connection to politics or race, and more importantly, it challenges all categories to which black artists are regularly relegated.
Born in 1924, near Amityville, New York, where he grew up, Mayhew is now 99 years old and lives in California. His must-see exhibition of the moment, Richard Mayhew: Natural Order at Venus Over Manhattan, consists of 21 paintings and works on paper made between 1973 and 2022.
Mayhew’s visionary paintings—what he calls “mental landscapes,” honoring the landscape as sacred—occupy a realm of art history that no contemporary painter touches; he is a singular figure whose work has never matched any of the movements the art world has promoted since 1950. When interviewed by Bridget Cooks and Amanda Tewes for the Getty Trust Oral History Project, African American Art History Initiative, he cited three of the figures crucial to its development: Edwin Dickinson, Reuben Tam, and the 19th-century American landscape painter George Inness, whose use of saturated colors and softened edges anticipates Mayhew’s work. By taking inspiration from these independent, non-aligned artists and creating something recognizable to him, Mayhew has developed an unparalleled sensitivity to color and nuance, while articulating a contradictory spatial “mindscape” that recedes dimensionally while advancing because of the saturated color. This simultaneity imbues his paintings with another world. They appear both solid and ethereal – a synthesis that echoes Pierre Bonnard’s many portraits of his wife, Marthe de Méligny, where she is never fully shown.
Composed of layers and textures of different reds bleeding into each other, it’s impossible to tell where the earth ends and the sky begins in “Essence II” (1973). While Mayhew captures this indeterminacy in many of his paintings, it does not repeat itself. In “Mood Indigo” (circa 1995), the larger of the two misty silhouettes of trees seems to be trying to pull away from the bright blue sky. Is this scene a memory or a hallucination? As in his other canvases, light comes from within shapes and spaces.
One of the most powerful and mysterious paintings in the exhibition is “Beyond the Bramble Bush (1996–97). The composition, with its large bush of green brambles near the center, suggests the possibility that we are walking through a landscape. A glowing orange path recedes into space, and beyond that an inlet of luminous blue water surrounded by green. The foreground of the painting looks familiar and believable, while everything behind the bush is mysterious and unknowable. What is the orange path made of? Is it liquid or lava? If so, where does it come from? Mayhew takes the viewer into a world that remains distant. What is this world in which we did we enter?
In some paintings, the artist has spelled out his surname, rendering the M as an inverted W and the Y as an inverted H. In this way, he offers that his paintings can be returned. He doesn’t do this in all of his paintings and watercolors, which would make it look like a cheap parlor trick, but this gesture both nods to Jackson’s full-length paintings Pollock and refutes them as being only a matter of painting. Perhaps this formalistic way of reading Pollock’s cast paintings contributed to Mayhew’s marginalization in the New York art world. It’s time to see his works for what they are: inimitable visions that only painting can evoke.
Richard Mayhew: Natural Order continues at Venus Over Manhattan (39 Great Jones Street, Noho, Manhattan) through June 17. The exhibition was organized by the gallery in collaboration with ACA Galleries.
