Richard Mayhew

For more than fifty years 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. 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. Mayhew received formal training at Columbia University, NY, Academia Florence, Italy, The Arts Students League, NY, and the Brooklyn Museum Art School, Brooklyn, NY. Mayhew taught art at numerous universities’ including Pennsylvania State University, PA, Hunter College and Smith College in NY and Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. Richard Mayhew is the recipient of many awards and honors including the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the Tiffany Foundation Grant, and the Ford Foundation Award just to name a few. The art of Richard Mayhew is in the permanent collections of Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, National Museum of Art, Smithsonian, Washington D.C., Studio Museum, Harlem, NY, Whitney Museum of Art, NY and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY.