2011Janet Berry Hess

In 1963 the African and Native American artist Richard Mayhew joined Romare Bearden, Emma Amos, and other prominent African American artists to form Spiral, an artistic alliance that represented African American artists in the March on Washington and that sought to formulate an ongoing artistic response to the civil rights movement. The significance of Mayhew’s abstracted landscapes—with their saturated color and allied message of suppression and denial—lies, according to Bearden’s survey of African American art, in the bridge they construct between the communal African American sensibility of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) era and abstract expressionism.1 Mayhew insisted, in opposition to abstract expressionism, that representation had inherent aesthetic value: “The figure was important during the civil rights movement—the figure which had been denied and omitted.”2 

Yet despite Mayhew’s association with painters and critics like Hans Hoffman, Max Beckmann, and Clement Greenberg; his involvement in Harlem and Greenwich Village as a jazz performer; and his assistance in shaping Spiral, his work has received scant art-historical attention. Although African American artists like Norman Lewis, Bearden, and Mayhew were in the vanguard of the postwar avant-garde, the history of abstract expressionism has largely expunged their contribution, instead canonizing the work of such artists as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. As Erika Doss suggests, this exclusion “relates to postwar ideas regarding race, gender, and artistic intentionality.”3Although the perspectives of such critics as Clement Greenberg, and subsequently Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, “aimed at suppressing the intentionality, subjectivity, and biography of the artist,” both the personal feelings and the biographical reflections of artists like Pollock and Rothko—and their distinctive artistic styles—were accommodated.4 The “institutional apartheid” and racism Doss describes were manifested at the level of the exclusion of the artist5 but were also demonstrated in a climate of privileging the artist’s heroism over the communal advocacy, production, and performance that can be understood as characteristic of African and African American art.6 

Mayhew’s legacy is complicated by his allusion to landscape and his artistic narrative of cultural “spiritual” commitments and ideals, his commitment to creating works with “symbolic religious meaning,” as Bearden and Harry Henderson state.7 Robert Motherwell’s phallic allusion in the Elegies to the Spanish Republic series and Willem de Kooning’s recurrent use of female imagery in the Woman series—even Pollock’s return to figuration in his late work—suggest an engagement with the issue of representation among abstract expressionists. Critical and popular expectations, however, have consigned representation in the work of African American artists to the genre of vernacular depiction, what Mayhew has described as “illustrational” or “storytelling” art or, more disparagingly, as “primitivism.”8 These critical, public, and institutional perceptions—combined with his philosophical alignment with community performance (in part derived from Spiral’s attention to African paradigms), as well as his disdain for promotional narratives of agonized heroism or “individuality”—have exiled Mayhew to the critical shadows. This essay seeks to address these issues within the context of the overriding challenge confronted by Spiral: “How do you survive as an artist or human being in a society that denies your existence?”9 

Discussions of Mayhew’s work invariably center on their relationship to “American atmospheric-romantic” painters of the nineteenth century and to postwar abstract expressionism. The influence of color-field painters is evident in his abstracted landscapes; as Amy Fine Collins argues, while “Mayhew celebrates what others find to be the ‘impurities’ of abstraction[,] he has happily resigned himself to the impossibility of suppressing references to land- and skyscapes within the general context of large colorfield abstractions.”10 A review in 1989 suggested that Mayhew was engaged in updating nineteenth-century luminism “with a rich sense of color and abstract composition.”11 Yet his trees, individual and fiercely identifiable, flout such categories, displaying their individuality explosively and tenderly, as in his Love Bush (2000). A dialectic between the abstract and the representational is gently and effortlessly revealed in Mayhew’s art, but a social dialectic is also evident, a juxtaposition between the American tradition of landscape painting expressing dominant political ideologies—manifest destiny and expansionist democracy, for example12—and the explicit claim in many of Mayhew’s landscapes, evident in the titles of the works and exhibitions, for land as a Native American and African American space, concept, or entitlement. 

Figure and Ground 

Mayhew’s work is often discussed in the context of the Hudson River school and luminist artists, as well as such artists as James McNeill Whistler and George Inness.13 Bearden and Henderson also suggest the alignment of Mayhew’s work, in its “fleeting, illusory light,” with the art of Henry Ossawa Tanner, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Eakins.14 Half a century ago the critic Sidney Tillum stated that while these artists “may be of some assistance in locating the elegiac remoteness of Mayhew’s landscapes . . . Mayhew is not nearly so dexterous with detail, striving instead for the radicals of a flat conception while modulating his color values and considering his shapes for amicability to an implied depth.”15 The “dexterity” of detail does not seem critical, but Tillum aptly describes the evocativeness of Mayhew’s work and the strength of his approach to abstraction. 

The abstraction and the explosive color of Mayhew’s paintings and watercolors suggest to some critics a conscious alignment with abstract expressionism. Mayhew acknowledges his friendship with and appreciation for the charismatic figures of that era, speaking bemusedly of shaking hands with Pollock at the Cedar Bar in Greenwich Village as Pollock gazed over his shoulder in search of “important” people,16 and describing a conversation with Motherwell while both were teaching at Hunter College:

Motherwell jokingly inquired of Mayhew, “What are you doing—copying me?,” to which Mayhew responded, “No, you are copying me.”17 Yet Mayhew turns aside critical efforts to align him with abstract expressionist art, emphasizing his fidelity to observed landscape. My interview with him in 2003 is illustrative: 

Janet Berry Hess: What would you say if someone said, because of the color in your landscapes, they’re so evocative in abstraction and color. . . . I would put you more with Mark Rothko and color-field painters than say, oh, he’s an African American artist? 

Richard Mayhew: [laughs] Oh, it [his use of color] has to do with Native American and African 

American artists heavily involved in the beauty of color, feeling, mood—but also someone said to me, “What do you see as purple and this kind of blue?” So I took him out in the landscape and said, “Look.”18 Mayhew’s insistent refusal of abstraction as an end in itself is reiterated in his response to questions about the critical dialogue on representation in the abstract expressionist era: 

Mayhew: [Showing the] figure was important . . .during the civil rights movement, showing the figure which has been denied and omitted, and not doing the African American image. . . . Many of the Western painters were not involved with doing an image—and [were] not showing African American images in a lot of European painting.

So [what counts is] how much [people] wanted to see their own image, or were involved with their own kind of cultural identity . . . instead of just painting. And also I didn’t want to just paint the figure for political reasons; I wanted to paint for the uniqueness of multicultural sensitivity. And this is what Romare Bearden did, even though he was involved with mimicking and responding to the cultural activity of Harlem, and also with the South, where he came [from]. But he was also very concerned about that [the uniqueness of multicultural sensitivity] too. He didn’t want to just make figures for making a comment about the civil rights thing; he wanted to make some kind of documentary sensitivity in relationship to his cultural feelings and [his own] sensitivity. So I felt the landscape was a part of the “forty acres and a mule”; there was the whole thing about African Americans not receiving the land they deserved, and also the Native Americans, since that is a part of my culture. . . .I don’t want to get away from things like the image or the figure.19 

It is an elusive line that Mayhew draws between abstraction and representation, between the evocative nature of abstraction and emotional fidelity to the image. In an interview with Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins, Mayhew suggested that, whenever viewers ask where the figure can be found in one of his paintings, he informs them, “You’re the figure.”20 While many of his works allude to specific sites or regions, it is the sensation of space that he attempts to evoke, rather than its replication: “Many of my so-called landscapes are very abstract because they are very free-form; I am involved with the spiritual feeling of space. Just to work with figures would be very limiting because that would identify a particular place or situation. The paintings look like landscapes but that is not necessarily my preoccupation in painting.”21 

On the most intimate level, Mayhew describes his paintings as “internalized experience on canvas.” He does not paint directly from nature, because he feels “trapped” by immediate response: “It’s better to go back to my studio and reflect on the essence of the subject.”22 Mayhew’s art emerges after reflection on experience; his work “takes on a lot of the sensitivity of the particular spot. Or the whole feeling of going through a particular region. . . .[The work] becomes a place. It becomes [the] essence, [the] suggestion of a place.”23 For Mayhew, art represents “how I feel inside . . . not so much a certain place in nature as a state of being.”24 The “being” that Mayhew depicts, however, also reflects specific personal and political experiences. In the 2003 interview Mayhew described his art in the context of 

“how much one’s ambition was always denied, and so as a  result [one’s works are] only half accomplishments, never  arriving at the great accomplishments that one had desired. I know my father was like that. And then my brother and myself. He [Mayhew’sfather] saw himself in terms of the he never made, that we’re making. . . . He felt very proud and strong . . . that the heritage was carried on to the ambition that he had always wanted to achieve.25 

The personal experience that Mayhew expresses in his work is richly inflected, encompassing private convictions, the influence of social and political forces, and an overt and conscious identification between the physical environment and his cultural identity. Mayhew believes that it is in his nature, and in human nature, to create,26 and in interviews he relentlessly brings back his engagement with landscape, ascribing it to his African and Native American heritage: “It’s a dual commitment to nature. The land is very important to both cultures, in terms of stimulation and spiritual sensitivity, and it’s very important to me.”27 

Spiral and Diasporic Engagement 

Emerging from formative educational and work experiences in New York City, Mayhew first went to Europe, then, following his return in 1962, became engaged with the social contexts and implications of artistic production during the civil rights movement. As Mary Schmidt-Campbell argues, a “southern, nonviolent movement protesting . . . disenfranchisement and social apartheid was rapidly moving north as an often violent expression of the fundamental ironies of racial difference,” yet this movement was not reflected in an art world focused on the satirical ironies and commercial commentary represented by pop.28 

In 1963 Bearden and Lewis held a meeting to form an “artists’ contingent” to participate in the March on Washington.29 After the march, these artists continued to meet to consider—according to a 1966 interview—“what should be their attitudes and commitments as Negro artists in the present struggle for Civil Rights.”30 The group never reached a definitive conclusion on this issue, and Mayhew maintains that “we weren’t supposed to; that was part of the spiral.” “[Our] multi-cultural background,” including African and European influences as well as “many other elements absorbed from American society . . . [constituted] a unique sensibility which, like jazz, is indigenous only to [North America].”31 

The bridge that Mayhew’s work constitutes, according to Bearden, between the communal African American sensibility of the WPA era and abstract expressionism can be envisioned as part of Spiral’s overall structure. According to Schmidt-Campbell:

Before World War II, the Black artist was able to work with his artist colleagues in the WPA-supported communities and the informal groups that clustered around the more formal ones. In New York, for example, the Harlem Artist’s Center; the Harlem Artist’s Guild; the WPA artists’ group, or “306,” in Charles Alston’s studio; and the 135th Street YMCA provided artists with spaces either to work, exhibit, or generally congregate as a group sharing a common endeavor. The sense of camaraderie and shared experience dissipated after the war, with the demise of the WPA. . . . Responding to their separate aesthetic imperatives[,] many Black writers and painters went abroad to work[,] including Romare Bearden, Beauford Delaney, James Baldwin, Albert Murray and Samuel Allen.32 

The structure of Spiral supported the coming together of artists associated with the Harlem Renaissance, such as Bearden, with a younger generation, including men such as Mayhew, Alvin Hollingsworth, and Reginald Gammon, as well as women like Faith Ringgold, Emma Amos, and Vivian Brown. It also drew together artists responding variously to the exclusion of African American artists—in Doss’s terms, through “institutional apartheid” and racism33—from the art market, allying a communal spirit with the more individualistic and introspective impulse of the abstract expressionists. 

From 1963 to 1965 Spiral met weekly in the artists’ studios or at 147 Christopher Street, in Greenwich Village, to discuss “artistic processes, existences and purposes; they challenged and stimulated one another’s thinking.”34 These challenging discussions were intended to reconcile individual creative endeavors with the overarching objective of civil rights. Spiral members suggested different approaches to this objective: Lewis, an abstract expressionist, maintained that “black artists should be allowed to paint anything—and in whatever style—they choose,” while Bearden reevaluated his aesthetic and was increasingly drawn to representing the figure.35 Spiral constituted for Mayhew “a means of confirming what he had already done: personally and individually acknowledge his African American past in his paintings without a breach of his aesthetics.”36 Certainly the group reinforced the support for community that characterized Mayhew’s efforts throughout his career: it “had an effect on every black artist in the country. The group provided a support mechanism for creative survival.”37In addition to fostering community and artistic production, Spiral drew attention to the systemic exclusion of African Americans from gallery shows and museum exhibitions. Mayhew describes picketing museums in New York City; in 1971, for example, he was among the fifteen artists who withdrew from the Whitney Museum’s Contemporary Black Artists in America show because it had not been organized by an African American curator. Mayhew describes this failure as “part of all the manipulation and control” characteristic of major museums: “Any time there was a black show, it was controlled by white curators who dictated which black artists should be seen. So you couldn’t win.”38 However, Mayhew never manifested his commitment to African American experience through overt depiction of struggle, which he disparages as “illustrational interpretation” or “storytelling.”39 As he stated in our 2003 interview: 

Most of the group in Spiral were completely abstract. Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, Hale Woodruff, Charles Alston—most of these master painters were abstract . . . involved in painting their personal sensibility. . . . What is African American art? Is it an image, of just painting black subjects? That’s not true. It’s the gut and feeling of the sensitivity of this person which is African American. . . . The artist has the right to paint any way he wants to, not to the dictates of the art market, which is involved [with decreeing that] this is black art and this is not black art.40 

When questioned directly about whether he has been misrepresented or misunderstood as a consequence of not creating overtly illustrational or militant art, Mayhew stated:

I guess for years they [critics] didn’t know I was an African American artist because I wasn’t involved with those kinds of subject matter, right? And the landscapes were accepted on the basis of that, so I had problems with [critics saying that I’m] not painting disruptive subject matter which is a pain to our society . . . but many of my peers respected what I was doing, so I just continued to do it. It has to do with the sensitivity of my culture, my dedication. My dedication now is really helping other artists and that was part of the whole group.41 

Diaspora and Community 

The focus Mayhew places on his role in the community characterizes art of the Diaspora. For Richard J. Powell in Black Art and Culture in the Twentieth Century, diasporic history is not “intellectually bound to the perceived race or nationality of a creator” but “looks instead to the art object itself, its multiple worlds of meaning, and its place in the social production of black identities.”42 Although Mayhew’s art does not conform to the narrative or illustrational style broadly identified as “African American,” it may be seen as diasporic in its manifestation of Robert Farris Thompson’s notion of the “flash of the Spirit”43—the retention, material or spiritual, and the reconstruction and conscious assimilation of Africa through communal sensitivity and engagement. 

Mayhew’s art is not consciously constructed to convey a social consciousness but is aligned with an inner, ineffable message: “There is a spiritual message in my paintings, but I don’t know the message, even when the painting is finished. It’s an elusive message.”44 Yet Spiral always was engaged with a social consciousness and purpose. When Mayhew joined Spiral in 1963, the prevalent tone of art in the United States was one of reflection on the surface, of employing “popular American images to make fun of aspects of American commercialism and bourgeois life.”45 Artists associated with Spiral challenged this stance on intellectual and aesthetic levels. Mayhew describes his involvement in establishing a community art center in the Ramapo Mountains of Appalachia: 

What does the artist do? What is he here for? If I don’t paint the kind of subject matter that relates to the community, maybe if I become involved with the community through an art center—maybe that is the role of the artist. How can community people relate to the artist? They do not always get a chance to go to museums and galleries. How can they respond and understand what art is all about unless there is a close rapport with the artist? Why can’t we set up a community-art relationship by bringing in poetry, the theater, the visual arts and exhibitions, dance and music workshops where everyone can participate instead of being passive spectators? I felt this is what the role of the artist should be—being actively involved in his community where people can then appreciate what he is doing as a painter, because they then have a chance to see it and to know him.46 

This sentiment lives on in Mayhew’s involvement in the community forty years later. Although Spiral disbanded in 1965, its influence endures in the work and teaching of Mayhew and others and in their willingness to draw on multiple identities and cultures to exemplify the ideal of “be[ing] true to yourself in a creative form.”47 Mayhew continues to reach out, particularly to marginalized communities and struggling artists; he supports Native American artists, visiting reservations and speaking to students about art and native traditions, and lectures frequently both about Spiral and about creative survival strategies.48 Mayhew’s advocacy of American art, and especially of African American art, reveals—as Powell suggests—that the diasporic character of Mayhew’s work, its “African Americanness,” is not “bound to [his] . . . perceived race or nationality” or to the formal aspects of his work but is located in his ongoing commitment to his peers, his friends, his fellow artists, and the community around him.49 

Improvisation, Individualism, and Creative Joy 

For all his prestigious affiliations and seriousness of purpose, and amid a life characterized by engagement and artistic discipline, Mayhew constantly demonstrates that for him artistic creation means improvisation, surrender, and intuition. He has worked in New York City as a singer, and the fluidity of and experimentation in his artwork show his commitment to what he describes, referring to jazz, as “improvisational internalized creative experience.”50 Mayhew listens to music as he paints, and his works sometimes allude to musical phrasing and technique. His movement from watercolor to pastel and his scratching away and erasure of certain images and passages suggest a willingness to experiment and a pleasure in spontaneity and the act of painting. Mayhew’s appreciation of Stuart Davis, Wassily Kandinsky, and Bearden also attests to the presence of music as a formative element in his work.51 Although preceded and undoubtedly influenced by rigorous academic training and professional experience with illustration and portraiture, Mayhew’s method is surprisingly unscripted: “When I walk to the canvas I don’t plan what I’ll do. I just smear paint on the canvas and I let it happen. I start with an abstract pattern and it develops into a representation of feeling. . . . I don’t impose reason on a painting. I don’t get locked into controlling it. Once you control it, you start losing the sensitivity of it.”52 But for all his improvisational spirit, Mayhew has remained faithful to his fondness for portraiture, expressed not only in early commissions but also in paintings like the series of historical African American judges and lawyers undertaken for Edward J. Littlejohn. Although not as well known as his landscape images, the portraits represent for Mayhew a continued commitment to making art that is important to him, regardless of his established “genre” or reputation. 

He continues to speak out passionately, even fiercely, about the denial of African American art and its omission from major exhibitions and museums, and the frustrations of working within a dominant culture’s paradigms. Although “the life of the poet is solitary,” Mayhew ceaselessly celebrates the painting process as involving, for him, “that moment of creative joy.”53 Painting “is an obsession. I find I have to do it. It’s the creative process. . . . It’s like a religious commitment”:

When one is born they are born with a creative spirit to survive, and that instinct becomes retarded in fitting into a societal structure. My deity is internalized in the beginning. Everyone has it; they just deny it because of the environment they are in. Mine has been that internalized existence. I interpret truth, whatever that is. What came out of Spiral was, be true to yourself in a creative form.54 

Mayhew has discussed his forty-year experience as an artist, the “forty thousand treaties broken” with Native America, and his Forty Acres exhibition (2003) as a mnemonic reiteration of societal neglect: “You don’t come to the end of that until it’s fulfilled . . . forty, forty, forty.”55 Yet despite the denial and omissions that have characterized the history of African American and Native American art, and despite the necessity of working within an imposed art-historical paradigm, Mayhew continues to demonstrate in his art and life the possibility of creative freedom. As he stated empathically to me in 2006: “You’re involved in the dominant culture. To the point, you’re not you. You’re them. You have to be them in order to survive . . . but you have the potential of breaking out of the mold and setting up a unique interpretation [of the world].”56 

1 Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson, A History of African American Artists: From 1792 to the Present (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 470.

2 Richard Mayhew, interview by author, Santa Cruz, CA, 2003. This interview appears in my book Art and Architecture in Postcolonial Africa (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006).

3 Erika Doss, Twentieth Century American Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 135.

4 Ibid. 

5 Ibid. 

6 For a broader discussion of the association between communal production and performance and African or African American art, see Hess, Art and Architecture, 162–76. 

7 Bearden and Henderson, History of African-American Artists, 476. 

8 Quoted in Hess, Art and Architecture.

9 Richard Mayhew, interview by author, Santa Cruz, CA, January 2008. 

10 Amy Fine Collins, “Richard Mayhew at Midtown,” Art in America, February 1988, quoted in Bearden and Henderson, History of African-American Artists, 470. 

11 Marsha Miro, “A Rich Sense of Color and Composition,” Detroit Free Press, July 21, 1989. 12 Sharon Patton, African American Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 79. 

13 Collins, “Mayhew at Midtown,” quoted in Bearden and Henderson, History of African-American Artists, 470.

14 Bearden and Henderson, History of African-American Artists, 470. 

15 Sidney Tillum, Arts 34 (1959), quoted ibid., 473. 

16 Hess, Art and Architecture.

17 Edward J. Littlejohn, interview by author, Sarasota, FL, August 5, 2006.

18 Hess, Art and Architecture.

19 Ibid.

20 Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins, “The Spiritual Realm of Richard Mayhew,” American Visions 15, no. 2 (2000): 20. 

21 Quoted in Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins, “The Spiritual Realm of Richard Mayhew,” African American News 13, no. 2 (2001): 16. (This article is a revised version of the one cited in n. 20.)

22 Joy Hakanson Colby, “Getting Back on an Upward Spiral: Mayhew Vows to Rebuild 60s Activist Art Group,” Detroit News, June 28, 1989. 

23 Judith Maloney, “Improvising Nature,” Research/Penn State, March 1992, 28. 

24 Charles Fergus, Research/Penn State, September 1983, 9. 

25 Quoted in Hess, Art and Architecture, 173. 

26 Colby, “Upward Spiral.”

27 Maloney, “Improvising Nature,” 29. 

28 Mary Schmidt-Campbell, Richard Mayhew: An American Abstractionist (exhibition catalogue) (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 1978), n.p. 

29 LeFalle-Collins, “Spiritual Realm,” American Visions, 19.

30 Maloney, “Improvising Nature,” 32.

31 Ibid.

32 Schmidt-Campbell, Richard Mayhew, n.p.

33 Doss, Twentieth Century American Art, 135. 

34 Schmidt-Campbell, Richard Mayhew, n.p. 

35 LeFalle-Collins, “Spiritual Realm,” American Visions, 19. 

36 Schmidt-Campbell, Richard Mayhew, n.p.

37 Colby, “Upward Spiral.”

38 Maloney, “Improvising Nature,” 32. 

39 Hess, Art and Architecture, 171.

40 Quoted ibid., 174.

41 Quoted ibid. 

42 Richard J. Powell, Black Art and Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 13.

43 See Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1983). The name Spiral itself has rich connotations, both of African belief systems and of communal sensibilities. In Congolese belief systems the spiral constitutes a cosmogram, as Thompson argues, and permeates every aspect of spiritual symbolism, tracing the spiritual continuity and connection between the living and their ancestors. 

44 Maloney, “Improvising Nature,” 31. 

45 Schmidt-Campbell, Richard Mayhew, n.p.

46 Quoted in Hess, Art and Architecture, 169.

47 Quoted ibid. 

48 Maloney, “Improvising Nature,” 30.

49 Powell, Black Art and Culture, 13.

50 Quoted in Eloise Johnson, Richard Mayhew: Defining Moments (exhibition pamphlet), Stella Jones Gallery, New Orleans, LA, October–November 2006, n.p. 

51 LeFalle-Collins, “Spiritual Realm,” American Visions, 21. 

52 Maloney, “Improvising Nature,” 31.

53 Eloise Johnson, Richard Mayhew: Forty Acres (exhibition pamphlet), Stella Jones Gallery, New Orleans, LA, October 2003, n.p.

54 Johnson, Richard Mayhew: Defining Moments, n.p. fulfilled . . . forty, forty, forty.”55 Yet despite the denial and omissions that have

55 Richard Mayhew, interview by author, Santa Cruz, CA, 2006.

56 Ibid.