2020

Andrew Walker: Where did your art training get started?

Richard Mayhew: It all started with art school at the Brooklyn Museum. It was a tremendous art school, much like the Art Students League, with great artists like Yasuo Kuniyoshi and others. I came there as a student. Reuben Tam, Edwin Dickinson, and the whole array of artists were there. Dickinson was my main influence. His work was mystical; he taught me how to make color out of tonal space. His technique reinforced what I learned about color while I was in Florence, Italy. I had a grant to study in Florence and I took my family. No one at that time took their family but I took my wife and two children and met a lot of artists there. I met Nelson Shanks. We would look at the work of Caravaggio and notice that he would illuminate one of the basic colors on purpose like orange. I saw orange but I did not see orange paint anywhere. I was looking at the blues and asking myself, Where is the orange? That was the illusion of color space and a very subtle phenomenon.

So when I started studying color more deeply, I went to the Uffizi museum often with Nelson Shanks; we studied together. He would smell the paint, which [drove] the guards crazy. And he would draw in the galleries; I did not get involved [with] drawing like he did. Later he established a school in Philadelphia that even today is involved with the basic structure of painting going way back in time. Nelson was trying to understand Italian Renaissance painting rather than French painting and he built a collection that he brought back to the states, to Philadelphia.

For me, though, it was color. I remember once there was an interpreter at the Uffizi who was translating poetry from one language to another and he helped me to understand the phenomena of the eye—the rods and cones on the eye—and how one sees the afterimage. I got heavy into the optical phenomena of the illusion of two-dimensional space. And so when I went to France and then to Amsterdam to study, I was caught up in how the artists in those places were using color. I saw that what was happening in the Italian Renaissance turned on the illusion of tonal space through color. This is about optic phenomena.

AW: Was this a turning point for you, the importance of color?

RM: Two-dimensional design became a real challenge for me. It was different than the traditions in Africa, where the artists were interested in ceramics and textiles and not illusionism. It was completely Western European. When I got involved in color, I was surprised that it was the Italian Renaissance painters rather than the French or the Flemish painters that developed illusionistic color. While in Florence I digested the idea of optical illusion involving color. The actual way paint is applied makes the difference. If you put it on thick or thin or in glazes it affects the quality of the illusionism.

AW: When did all of this occur?

RM: This took place in the late 1950s. I came back to teach at the Brooklyn Museum. Edwin Dickinson and Reuben Tam made the suggestion that, since I was such a good student, I should teach among the heavies. Both of them were also teaching at the Art Students League. In Brooklyn, though, you had very serious students mixed with grandmothers. I enjoyed both groups; their interest in creativity trumped talent.

AW: Could you explain that a bit more? What about innate talent?

RM: When I was just a little boy I could draw upside down and backward. My grandmother encouraged me to be an artist. She would bring home art books and magazines like Apollo Magazine—the famous antique and art magazine. I would draw everything you could imagine. I have no idea about what happened to those pieces. When my father died, everything just disappeared. I am grateful to my grandmother; she encouraged my innate talent. She was a baker. She was hired out and made all sorts of pastry. When she was at her clients’ homes she would bring back the magazines. I would hide out in the attic and read the magazines. And then in 1965 Apollo did an article on me. It was just a paragraph but it was exciting. It was an interdisciplinary magazine and I absorbed that; then I became an interdisciplinarian in the 1970s at Hunter College.

John Wilson took me on as an apprentice around that time. When he died, I found out his full name was John Wilson Peale; he was part of that famous art family in Philadelphia. He took me on and taught me drawing, and he realized that I was really good, fantastic even. I did a lot of drawing and, in fact, I did several children’s books that show my skill as an illustrator. I did these while I was in Europe, sending them back in order to get money to stay over there. John Wilson recognized that drawing was easy for me; it was not a problem of skill.

AW: Around that time you were part of Spiral, the art collective. Were you an interdisciplinarian then?

RM: When I came back from Europe, I had a whole mind-set of interdisciplinary studies. I wanted to connect to the timespace illusions that happened in all the arts—music, ballet, opera. Time-space illusion—I got heavy into that, a strong sense of interdisciplinary consciousness. I became a jazz singer. The music that I heard in Europe had that time-space illusion. My singing career, however, was shortlived because I always ran back to my studio. [What] is this compulsion I have to paint and draw?

When I returned from Europe, I also greatly admired the African American elders.

Spiral was the first group involved with ethnicity and creative consciousness. All the artists involved wanted to know how ethnicity was the driving force with the innate ability of the creative process. Hale Woodruff documented African American history with giant murals influenced by Mexican muralists. And Romare Bearden was an abstractionist except for the early figurative work that he did. And there was Norman Lewis, who was a mystical painter. Fantastic. I would talk to Norman a lot. I wanted to understand the why and the how he was doing this, his mystical painting. He never revealed the secret—in terms of everything being interrelated, all forms of creativity.

They were the elders and they were not just physically committed, but [also] intellectually, to this idea of creative consciousness. Hale Woodruff was the first African American professor at any university and he was an art educator and not involved with the studio at all. Charles Alston, who taught during the Harlem Renaissance, he was there. They all had different sensibilities. Each one was different.

AW: Did the group aspire to politics? After all, it was during the Civil Rights era.

RM: The group was aware of the politics; and they did believe that ethnicity—race—played a role, but we were mostly about creative consciousness, and each artist had different sensibilities in terms of making art. These approaches were not equal, but you could not say that one was better than the other. Romare Bearden’s mother was a terrific politician in Harlem and he did not come into his own until she passed away. The sensibility he had became part of him, and his work began taking off. He was very inward and mystic, though not to the extent of Norman Lewis. Only now, in later years, I tried to analyze what was the influence of them on me and what they were going through during the Civil Rights era. Hale Woodruff and I would spend a lot of evenings talking together about the creative sensibility, because when I got involved with teaching, he said that you have to pull the curtain between the two areas. Teaching is a creative process and needs to be kept separate from your own personal creative process. For me, in my teaching, I did not want anyone to imitate what I was doing. I wanted them to understand the process of creativity and the uniqueness of self.

AW: Was that the goal, then, of Spiral?

RM: The Spiral group was so profound; I thought they were heavy into ethnicity but they were not. They were involved with the creative consciousness; and the ethnicity aspect came in only in its relationship to the arts in America. Spiral started from the influence of the Civil Rights activist [A.] Philip Randolph. He called on Hale Woodruff to get a group of artists to march on Washington. And not just visual artists, but composers, writers, and musicians. That challenged them to organize. When I entered [Spiral] I was in an exhibition in the Bronx. Felrath Hines, the top [conservator] for the Smithsonian, he is the one who took me to Spiral. He was one of the founders of Spiral; he was an intellect. He did not get involved in the trivial talk but was committed to serious talk about art and advocacy within the African American community. Spiral did not have any younger artists, and the elders needed youth. So I brought in four young artists. Bill Majors, who I met in Florence. He was a fantastic painter and printmaker. He taught the Spiral group how to do printmaking. Emma Amos, a woman, was interested in color the way I was. Then there was Reginald Gammon and Al Hollingsworth. These were the young artists I knew, and I brought them into Spiral. All of them became professors at universities. Gammon went to Western Michigan University. Hollingsworth went to NYU and Majors to the University of New Hampshire. You have to realize that the 1960s was the first time that artists were invited to teach in universities as separate from art schools. In Europe, it was still not possible. They had separate schools for art.

AW: What made that so significant?

RM: When you become part of the university system you are not teaching serious students in general. When I started teaching I was an interdisciplinarian and was involved with the creative consciousness applied to all areas. I came to the Brooklyn Museum with the germ of that idea [which] Spiral helped to confirm. For me, two-dimensional illusion was the foundation of creative consciousness: color—primary, secondary, and diluted colors. I came back from Europe with this basic sensibility, and this is what I was teaching. And I was applying it in my own work. That came from Spiral; each artist had their own sensibility.

AW: How does that relate to the ethnic or racial desires of Spiral?

RM: I have a dual heritage—African American and Native American. There was a split sensibility to what I was painting. Spiral was really involved in digesting ethnicity as a part of the creative consciousness. They were the great African American artists; and I still feel that way. The identity of African Americans was important; Bearden even tried to write a manifesto at the time. They felt that ethnicity had much to do with their creative consciousness, a factor for certain, but one that was secondary to the creative consciousness expressed individually.

AW: What other artists, historically, influenced you in formulating this idea?

RM: Monet and Cézanne—I was looking at their work and how it was an influence in their time. After all, the Italian Renaissance was a reflection of the cultural moment at the time. And in France it was the same thing, with the Impressionists and later the abstractionists. It was a progression that followed cultural influence. I was massively confused when I tried to analyze this phenomenon because none of us had written about that. Spiral was a part of my participation in the American cultural moment. The uniqueness of the human spirit during an era of great change—Civil Rights. What did we intend to say as black artists?

AW: Shortly after Spiral dissolved, you were elected to the National Academy of Design as an Academician. Tell me about that. Is it not radically different from the project of Spiral?

RM: I was nominated, though I do not remember by whom. I was represented by the Midtown Gallery on 57th Street at the time, and in 1970 the National Academy elected me as an Academician. It was shocking; I was still coming to grips with being an artist. And here I was being made an Academician. I said to myself, “What kind of politics were involved in getting me here?” I had to be voted on by a committee and then the whole membership; it was not that political. I was humbled by it and I was always trying to elect others but I could not always get together a committee to do that. When I came to the West Coast, I found out that many artists there were not being nominated, so I organized a West Coast chapter, and most of the first participants were architects. Our first meeting was held at the Legion of Honor. New York did not allow me to do this. I did not want to be the head of it, but I did for a while. This was the early 1970s.

AW: Did being an Academician change your artistic journey?

RM: This was a period of transition of art at that time of superrealists—the photorealists. I had been teaching at Hunter but they did not have tenure and San Jose State had an opening and I came [here], to California. And, remember, I am an interdisciplinarian. Creative consciousness is [not just] involved in the visual arts; it involves all, be it a doctor or a businessman. The question is, How unique are you? They laughed at me, so I went to Sonoma State and I did my interdisciplinary work there. Soon I learned of an opening at Penn State University. They had just fired one of the professors and I discovered an opening for a full professor. So I went to Penn State; they offered me a deal: I would be an associate professor for one year and then I would be eligible for the full professorship. The dean there had heard of my interdisciplinary studies but the faculty would not have anything to do with it and they overloaded me with painting courses. So I left after two semesters; but I returned [in 1977] and taught until I retired in 1991. I created an interdisciplinary program when I came back. Afterward, as a committed interdisciplinarian, I taught art history at Santa Cruz University—African American art history. I had a curriculum that I submitted to Stanford University but they did not support it. They looked at me as an interloper coming in from outside. They wanted to know what books I was using; but there were no books. I said Apollo Magazine, and they laughed. So at Santa Cruz I taught African American art history using Samella Lewis’s African American Art and Artists. She was a dear friend.

AW: Did you look at other historical American artists other than your compatriots in Spiral? I have read that George Inness influenced you.

RM: I was influenced by the Impressionists and the American Impressionists. My first exhibition was in the East Village. John Kennedy did the review and said I was a neo-Barbizon painter. I did not even know who those artists were. When he wrote that I said to myself, What? So I went to see their works. They were tonalists. But that was before I got involved in understanding color.

I was influenced by Inness because of the mystery in his paintings. His early work was plastic and tight-edged like the English tradition or the Hudson River School painters. Later there were no hard edges. Hard edges come out right away. If you wanted hard edges in one part, then you had soft edges over in another; this creates twodimensional illusion. As a young artist, I was working on Madison Avenue and I saw Inness’s work for the first time in a gallery. I would go to the galleries along Madison Avenue and I would want to see his work; the gallery owners were very sympathetic and would invite me in so that I could study him. I studied his work.

AW: Did you look at other American landscape painters?

RM: Yes, of course, but [my paintings of nature are] essentially my experience. I drove across [the] country six times. Three times across and back; I took the northern route. And every time I drove, I saw it differently. When I got to California, that was it: all the lakes and the rivers and the mountains. Every part of the landscape is here in one state. It was overwhelming in the beginning. The landscape is not based in place; it is an emotional space. This is where my unique sensibility took root. I am using landscape as a metaphor to express the emotional state: fear, anxiety, ambition. What does ambition look like? What color is it?

In the course of doing my painting, I do not plan ahead of time. I put some color on the canvas, and it develops based on my experience of the landscape. It is intuitive. I work for a time and then I go back, and there might be a completely different feeling. The landscape changes. Sometimes a gallery will come to me and say I have a buyer for that painting and I will say, “What painting?” It would have completely changed. So it is a feeling, and it changes with the moment. This is my process. And it is . . . my belief in the creative consciousness that drives my process. I work from the inside (emotion) to the outside (the landscape).

AW: I have heard you call these “mindscapes.”

RM: Mindscapes, yes. They are not landscapes; they are based on emotion. The reference is always imaginary [and it] keeps changing, and when people ask me, “What does it have to do with my ethnicity?” I say it is very simple: The African American and Native American in my experience. Nature is constantly reinventing itself, and that is how I relate it to ethnicity. But basically it is about creative sensitivity, consciousness; it transcends race ultimately. This is what I brought to Spiral.

AW: In the Brooklyn Museum venue of the recent exhibition Soul of a Nation, your work Pastoral was included. The work is very limited in palette, black and white. Some art historians want to read race into the work.

RM: In the early exhibition of Spiral, the goal was to present a black-and-white exhibition. Ethnicity perhaps had some influence; after all, black and white. That is why I painted in those tonalities. The show was based on the unity of this group doing a black-and-white show. The painting that was in the Brooklyn show is from the period of my more tonal work. So this had to do with my personal evolution, not race.

Inness had figures in his paintings, which he said was for scale: to define the space. Once he put figures in, it defines the sense of space. But he never gave them hard [edges]; they were undefined, soft-edged. He was more representational than I was; I am interested in the more mystical aspects of his work. And I would do it with a palette knife, not a paintbrush, with no brushstrokes.

AW: I have always wondered if Robert Duncanson’s work influenced you. After all, both of you paint landscape and are African American.

RM: When I studied Italian art or French art, I was trying to figure out what is the ethnicity here. So I did the same thing with my identity as an African American or a Native American. And my wife, Rosemary, is Apache and she has made documentaries on the Native American residence schools. Duncanson also had an African American sensibility. All along my journey I have been sensitive to ethnicity in any group. What is the uniqueness of the ethnicity in all artists? The Italian artists had influence from the [Moors] and the Greeks. All of this had influence. That is what I mean about African American sensibility versus European sensibility. It is an influence other than their ethnicity. African American painters early [on] were easel painters, which is a European concept.

How much, then, was Duncanson involved with that kind of sensibility? But this is important; the impact of using that method as an African American is not a direct influence of their ethnicity. So what does that mean? For me, what does it means after living in Italy, France, and then Harlem? What is the ethnicity that you have; what is it based on? African Americans coming out of slavery or Native Americans and the trauma they endured; it all goes back to nature. That understanding, and all of my own experiences in the landscape, gave me the courage to use nature as a

metaphor.

AW: So landscape as a form has been your expressive vessel?

RM: “Why are you painting landscapes?” Most people expect a landscape to be based on nature. But for me it is a nature space. Landscape means specificity, but I resist that. The Hudson River School; I used to travel to Canada and upstate New York and the New England states. That is what Duncanson did, too. I painted that area and I used to paint portraits while I traveled to make money. This was in the Catskills; I would go there and paint portraits. The great-grandchildren of those clients would have the paintings now. This was in the 1940s and 1950s. I would pop up at the resorts; I knew some of the entertainers and the waiters there. I was a singer so I would fill in between headliners. I could sing pretty well at that time. All of those experiences of that landscape go into my portrayals of nature space.

AW: How important has the gallery world been to you?

RM: In the beginning I was represented by the Robert Isaacson Gallery up on Madison Avenue; and then the Midtown Gallery on 57th Street. I was with Midtown for many years, about twenty to thirty years. That was the only place to be; they picked me up from the Isaacson Gallery. That is how it worked. One gallery owner would find you and make an arrangement to represent.

AW: When did you join the ACA Gallery?

RM: The ACA Gallery came later, because the Midtown Gallery came to an end in the mid-1990s. I have had several solo and two-person shows at the gallery, and we’ve had a lovely and positive working relationship ever since. Norman Lewis was in one of the main New York galleries—the Willard Gallery—with the other mystic artists at the time—the Abstract Expressionists. Willard was a very prominent gallery, but they would not show his work. This was a racial thing. He sent a friend into the gallery to see if Norman’s work was on view; it was not. So he took all of his work out of there. He could not sell his work for but a couple thousand dollars. Now he is selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. So he taught, and I helped him with that.

I was teaching at Hunter College, and because of that I could no longer teach at the Art Students League. They asked me to recommend someone, and I recommended Norman Lewis; he took over my classes. I had to talk to the class about it and they signed up to be taught by Lewis. And I would stop by every now and then, and the students said that he was remarkable. They said he would get inside your head. He taught there until he died. As an African American, his rejection by the galleries and acceptance by his students were all part of his experience and contributed to his creative consciousness.

Like me and my mindscapes, Norman’s abstraction was about the internal uniqueness of self; we just had different sensibilities. I stayed in touch with Norman and when I went to Penn State, he would come and visit and speak to my classes.

AW: Both you and Norman Lewis had significant experiences as teachers. Are there any students you remember?

RM: I had a student recently, Beverly McIver, who is a figure painter and was one of my students at Penn State. Her . . . application is very deliberate and free, she can make a face with just a few marks, like Henry Ossawa Tanner. She is very famous now as an African American who brings her identity as a black woman into her work. Right now she is at the American Academy in Rome. They tried to get her to come back to Penn State to teach.

Another student recently wrote me a letter saying that my interdisciplinary approach has affected his whole life. Now he is teaching at Penn State as an interdisciplinarian. I have another good story. I had a student from when I was teaching at Pratt Art School, right after my time at the Brooklyn Museum and before Penn State. He became a banker. I was walking on a street in New York and he called out my name. He was a teenager when I taught him. I asked what he is doing and he said he got into business and that he helps young artists to make work and put it in banks to sell. He took me across the street and showed me a young artist’s work in the bank. He actually gets bankers to sponsor young artists. It was at Chase Manhattan Bank. But that was all because of my interdisciplinarian teaching. He was involved in the broader application of creativity unique to his talents.

AW: Does every experience, in addition to ethnicity, go into an artistic sensibility?

RM: Yes. One of the famous African American sculptors wrote me a letter before he passed away—John Scott from New Orleans. He was the first to do musical sculpture. I knew him as an artist from whom I wanted to learn more about his use of nature. There was a natural structure in nature that affected his sculpture; it reacted to the wind and made sound.

His work reminded me of an experience. I was on the border of Germany and France when I first studied in Europe. I encountered a little boy who did not speak English but he pointed for me to go to a place where the willows stood. The wind was blowing and it made a beautiful sound. It was like a classical music piece. Those experiences I retained and utilize them, just as John Scott clearly did.

I am never idle. While I am in restaurants, I sometimes sketch people that I see. Sometimes I give them the portrait. One man tried to pay me for it but I said no, I could not accept payment. I sketch on bills, receipts, and envelopes. I do sketch professionally, but they are finished works. I don’t make sketches for my paintings. The last portrait I did was for Stan Latham and his daughter. Every once in a while I do self-portraits too, but I do not show them.

AW: In my experience, an artist’s relationship with collectors can be profound and often aligns with, in your words, a creative consciousness. Have you had committed collectors?

RM: Pamela Joyner is one of my greatest collectors. She has sixteen of my paintings. She started with me and then began collecting African American artists. She donated one of my works to the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. I painted one work, called Pamela’s Aura, for her. I used to attend her parties at her house in the Presidio. Her husband, Fred Giuffrida, commissioned that work for her birthday. She is on the boards of many museums across the country: the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Tate in London. But she came later in my career. It is like the Medici family, who is in and who is out, but she is committed to champion African American artists through her collecting and through the sponsorship of exhibitions, including all of those artists in Spiral.

My other collectors include Stan Latham. But I must stress that many of them I do not even know. Stan, however, is a good friend and a television producer for BET and has worked with David Chappelle. I invited him to speak to my classes at Penn State. In Detroit there was a big commission for work in office buildings. That was through the Sherry Washington Gallery. And I have people in the Bay Area here who have collected multiple works by me.

Reggie Van Lee also has a lot of my works. He lives in Texas and travels all over the world. He is black and has a distinguished career advocating for the arts in addition to being an accomplished engineer. Many of my most devoted collectors are African American. But there is also a mix; when I first started painting, a lot of my supporters were Jewish. When I was teaching at the Brooklyn Museum I had a show there, and many of my early collectors purchased work out of the show. The museum was more a community center at the time; it was near the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

AW: It would seem that ethnicity has played a significant role, if not in your actual painting, in the networks of groups and organizations that have supported your growth, your creative consciousness.

RM: In my family there was none of the artistic qualities that I have shown, except for their creativity for survival. I grew up in New York on Long Island. My grandmother was Shinnecock and my grandfather was Montauk, which was a tribe that linked to the black community on Long Island. My mother was Cherokee, [a tribe] which [mixed with African Americans and so] were also half black. I had an exhibit on Long Island and the tribal chief came and introduced himself because his ancestor was a Mayhew, which is actually a Native American name. He told me that my ancestors sold the Hamptons to the English, but they spelled their name Mayhue.

My heritage is more Native American than African American, but I grew up as an African American. I never got any support from the native side of my family. They would leave the reservation for financial reasons and go to places like Amityville which were African American towns. There are many such places. I had a confusion there in terms of identity but I lived my life as an African American.

The spiritual quality of my creative consciousness, however, emerges from both. I have always been fascinated with that. What value does ethnicity have to do with one’s universal creative consciousness? I told that to Hale Woodruff . . . once and he said, “Yes, you have a point.” But the influence of place and environment and community play into the creative consciousness. The unique sensibility of the creative mind-set is an important quality. The ethnicity is more emotional than identifying with a particular group. My mindscapes are also about the healing of that long trauma that the black and the native communities have experienced collectively