looking at the world
through Mayhew's eyes
I started this essay in the summer of 2023, during my time as Communications Intern at The Studio Museum in Harlem under the guidance of Studio magazine editorial director Meg Whiteford. At the time, Richard Mayhew was 99—he has since passed away, living to 100 years old. During my internship, I was really excited at the thought of potentially writing another essay about art and having it published in Studio magazine, but I didn’t know where to start. During this summer, we experienced orange skies in New York City, as a result of the wildfires in Canada, with warnings to stay inside due to air quality concerns. Out of the many reports and viral videos shared online, I read some describing our sky as a blue canvas now painted orange. It felt vaguely similar to Richard Mayhew’s landscape paintings; his unique use of bright and vivid colors, and brilliant expression of different moods and emotions through each of his works.
While I don't claim each occurrence to be directly related, I do wonder how our view of the land we inhabit would change, if we were to consider the orange skies in June 2023, and more recent wildfires in California. Could we consider them emotional responses from Earth, similar to Mayhew’s use of landscape as a metaphor for expressing emotion?
Moreover, would that change our view of the land we inhabit and its health as a priority?
Richard Mayhew’s work is rooted in emotion, utilizing landscape as a reflection of illusion, time and space. With the consistent influx of news of Manhattan sinking due to its growing mass and rising sea levels 1 and the recent orange skies we saw this past June, it feels right to reexamine our environment through the lens of an artist as prolific as Mayhew. Out of many of the evident and frightening reality checks we’ve had about the state of our environment and the way it is rapidly changing, the skies that were colored orange due to wildfires in Canada, have been the most affirming.
The effects of the Canadian wildfires in New York City called me to investigate the environments and landscapes of the past in the United States. In doing so, questions arose regarding those who originally tended to the environments of the cities we navigate and explore. More importantly, who are those most affected by environmental changes over time? Exploring Mayhew’s work allowed me to do this in a new and interesting way, given that he saw and experienced many environmental and sociopolitical changes throughout his lifetime and was adept at communicating this through his work.
Mayhew’s work holds an emotional heat map to landscapes across the United States. While his landscapes may be somewhat imagined, the emotions evoked are certainly not. He beautifully played with shapes and color to reimagine classic landscapes linked to the emotional connections and memories of the environments he imagined.
Through his described mindscapes —integral to his art—he would depict emotions ranging from love to fear. There is a specific language that Mayhew speaks, one that connected him with the environments he interacted with, and is captured in each of his paintings. Each shift and change, communicated through expressive brushstrokes, colorful tension, and visual structure, such as hills and valleys, and pathways that lead the eye further into the canvas, mirror shifts in emotion and cultural memory.
In a tribute to celebrate Mayhew’s 100th birthday published by Culture Type, Bridget R. Cooks said, “Richard Mayhew has given the world a lifetime of imaginary and inspired places, places that without him would never have existed. Through his paintings, he has attracted a community of viewers who visit his world landscapes and seascapes and have made it their own. He continues to generate these places in a seemingly insatiable quest to share with viewers the beauty of what he has seen, dreamed, and felt, so that they can feel it too."2
He has always attributed both his African American and Native American identities as a touchstone for his work, often citing his background as the reason for his environmental sensibility. Hearing stories about his Shinnecock and Cherokee-Lumbee heritage and family history growing up shaped his view and connection to nature.
Richard Mayhew was born in 1924 in Massapequa, New York. When listening to recordings of Mayhew speak, the richness of his experiences and interactions with the world shines through. Despite growing up in a more suburban neighborhood, his interactions with both rural and city landscapes were far from limited. As part of the Getty Trust Oral History Project, Bridget R. Cooks and Amanda Tewes co-conducted an interview with Richard Mayhew in 2019, where he states he lived with his grandmother in Amityville, New York.
Once his parents separated, he spent time traveling back and forth from the suburbs to the city, to see his parents, describing his mother as a citygoer and father a “country bumpkin.”3 Changing between schools in New York City and Long Island disrupted his schooling later, but allowed his exploration in different artistic worlds. His interest in art was always present. Mayhew lived at his grandmother’s house and was inspired by the art magazines and books she would bring home, specifically the Apollo Magazine. He was inspired by the magazine’s interdisciplinary structure and would draw all the time. He would use graphite to draw people on brown paper bags, brown wrapping paper, and newsprint, even drawing a whole series of sports players. He would draw figures from different sports, including basketball, baseball, and football, cut them out, and play games with them.
His interest in painting was sparked during one of his summers on Long Island. He found the Hudson River School painters along the coast and would go and watch them. He was fascinated by the painting process and seeing their final creations. After noticing him watching them paint each day, the painters encouraged him to join them. Through letting him paint, they saw how talented he was, and eventually took him on as an apprentice for the short time they were there.
His passion for landscape painting was ignited during a trip to see 19th-century Tonalist painter George Inness’ work in a New York City art gallery. The mystique that Mayhew saw in Inness’ painting was a concept that propelled him; one he tried to capture in his own work, with consideration for his African American and Native American identities.
Mayhew was later a member of Spiral (1963–1965), an art collective founded in July 1963, originally created in response to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.4 The artists’ collective founded by Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, Charles Alston, Hale Woodruff, and Felrath Hines was a think tank wherein Black artists could collaborate and discuss ideas about utilizing art to shift perspectives of Black Americans and make progress toward social justice. Each member “offered a unique kind of sensibility,”5 which Mayhew had always searched for and gravitated towards in his career.
The beauty of the collective was the group’s hopes to echo their creative concepts and ideas for change through discussion and art. Spiral wasn’t an exclusive club but a collective initiative for change, despite starting with a specialized super team. Romare Bearden was the “teddy bear of the group,”6 knitting together ideas through collage and print work. Hale Woodruff created large figurative murals and originated the name of the collective. Charles Alston was a figurative painter and had earlier founded and taught at the 306 group in Harlem. Felrath Hines, who brought Mayhew to Spiral, was an abstract painter working “to make universal visual idioms from complex personal experience.”7 His work from the 1960s focused on landscapes and is of the same strain as Mayhew’s paintings. Norman Lewis, who grew up in Harlem, was a skilled teacher and abstract expressionist painter.
The conversations and friendships Mayhew made within Spiral, despite how short-lived the collective was, affected him throughout his career. He would have conversations with Romare Bearden, Hale Woodruff, and Norman Lewis about the creative consciousness, not only within Black American sensibility, but society at large. Mayhew has credited Felrath Hines for keeping him focused on important conversations and Norman Lewis for his discussion of the inner world of this creative consciousness. Hines would encourage Mayhew to imagine himself inside the landscape he was painting, in order to fully grasp the uniqueness of the space he was creating. We see this with each Mayhew mindscape, each evoking a different mood and igniting a new visceral experience.
Mayhew echoes this when shown painting in an interview with KQED-FM, a California-based radio station, saying, “When I’m painting, I’m inside the painting, not outside painting it. I’m really in a trance. In time and space and while I’m doing it, I have no consciousness of it. I’m just completely lost inside the painting.”8 When looking at Mayhew’s paintings, I feel as though I’ve been placed inside each world he’s opened a window to.
Mayhew was the last living member of the collective, but each member within their artistic careers and personal lives made great strides in utilizing art to invoke change. Many of them continued to extend their ideas and creative concepts through teaching. Mayhew himself taught at several institutions, including a 14-year professorship at Pennsylvania State University.
Mayhew interacted with and studied impressionists and artists who experimented with optical illusions and two-dimensional design. He found that working with basic shapes integral to two-dimensional design, circles, squares, and triangles were elements one could experiment with to express his sensitivity and create the mindscapes he hoped to. What seemed too mechanical at first became a subconscious part of his practice.
This is evident in all of Mayhew’s paintings. One could sit and explore the inner consciousness and sensitivity in each of his mindscapes indefinitely. His use of recessionary shapes and primary and secondary colors is integral to drawing viewers in. One can see the influence George Inness had on Mayhew’s work in terms of his expressive painting and sense of movement and metamorphosis in his landscapes.9 Yet he subverts the expected subtle and easy colors and puts vivid, striking—even searing—colors in his mindscapes. This mysticism and inner consciousness bring a new meaning to Mayhew’s paintings, saturating his environments with even more entrancing and striking qualities.
Throughout his life, Mayhew traveled across the country from New York to California six times, each endeavor informing his views of nature and funneling them into his artistic practice. Mayhew has recounted being exposed to the “sensitivity and moods of nature,”10 with the ability to see how landscapes from each previous visit would grow and change. California is still known for being the most biodiverse state in the country, home to a multitude of habitats and ecoregions, including coastlines, mountains, and deserts, and approximately 6,500 plant types. The state, however, has some major stressors now more than ever; housing one of the largest economies in the world, with a population of around 40 million, and continuous news of voracious wildfires within the state.11 The state is also a biodiversity hotspot, meaning it is pervaded with a multitude of rare and diverse plant species, and is highly threatened. Since the initial Palisades wildfire on January 7, 2025, there have been 1,292 wildfires and around 63,000 acres scorched12 in the state. California stands as an example of the increasing danger of exhausting the environments that nurture us.
We can only imagine the natural beauty Mayhew saw on each of his trips through California, and the drastic changes he observed in his lifetime. Today, we’re seeing these changes happen in fast motion.
The combination of the generational knowledge passed on to Mayhew from his grandmother, along with his own natural sensibilities, definitely shaped his practice. His paintings aren’t a direct result of his experiences as an African American and Native American, but are definitely influenced by his multitude of experiences.
As Mayhew said in an interview with SFMoMA in 2018, “There’s a whole understanding of Native Americans in terms of the phenomena of nature, because they survived and lived very well, very healthy existence until the Europeans came. And in terms of Afro American and Native Americans, their blood is in the soil of the United States.” This love and respect for nature are ingrained in Mayhew and were passed down from his grandmother. His Shinnecock and Cherokee roots trace back as far as 1650. Growing up with his grandmother, he was fueled with knowledge of Native American kinship with the environment and details of Shinnecock Indians being forced off their land. In addition to his African American and Cherokee mother leaving the country in order to avoid being put in a residential school.
As Lisa Corinne Davis wrote about Mayhew’s work in a contribution to the Culture Type tribute, “Richard has painted believable but non-existent landscapes that speak to identity through notions of space as a way of understanding the world. He recognizes that space is deeply connected to the Black experience– spaces we can be in, spaces we are left out of, and spaces that were taken away."13 Mayhew’s capacity to envision his own spaces and immortalize them through his paintings makes this more substantial.
Although Mayhew cites his mindscapes as metaphors for emotion through landscape, I think his work is indicative of the emotions of our environments as well. Mayhew’s choice of using landscape as a metaphor is perfect because it couples emotions and nature, two phenomena inherent to us, and mirrors them back to each viewer. Each of us is as complex and storied as the land around us, all connected as inhabitants of this world, and experiencing the same emotions, whether that be love, sadness, or fear. Mayhew’s work exhibits visions of earth, which we are so accustomed to, and pushes us to think more deeply about it. Land is often politicized and monitored, who owns it, who cultivates it, and who has access to it, speaking to another level of depth in Mayhew’s paintings.
The emotional landscapes Mayhew painted were just underneath the surface of everything we see. The environments we explore are rich with the history and experiences of those who lived before us, a physical reflection of the treatment it’s endured. The spaces we explore are new to us, but are far more weathered than we can imagine, with many who walked before us.
My hope in creating this mindscape project is not only to highlight Mayhew’s amazing work and ideas, but hopefully create a space for people to improve their emotional well-being and relationship to our environment. Maybe through examining ourselves, we learn more about the environments around us. It’s possible that creating versions of environments we’ve thought up, like Mayhew, push us to protect and honor the ones we already have.
Are our own experiences of emotional burnout similar to the ways in which we’ve exhausted resources on Earth? Are natural disasters, such as the wildfires, physical manifestations of this? These are all questions I ask as a result of Mayhew’s work, and I wish to open the conversation for others to ponder.
1Laurie Winkless, “New York City Is Sinking Under The Weight Of Its Own Buildings,” Forbes, June 15, 2023, https://www.forbes.com/sites/lauriewinkless/2023/06/15/new-york-city-is-sinking-under-the-weight-of-its-own-buildings/.
2 Victoria L. Valentine, “Richard Mayhew at 100: Artistic Community Pays Tribute to ‘One of America’s Most Important Landscape Painter,’” Culture Type, April 3, 2024, https://www.culturetype.com/2024/04/03/richard-mayhew-at-100-artistic-community-pays-tribute-to-one-of-americas-most-important-landscape-painters/.
3 Richard Mayhew, “Richard Mayhew: Painting Mindscapes and Searching for Sensitivity” conducted by Bridget Cooks and Amanda Tewes in 2019, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, under the auspices of the J. Paul Getty Trust, 2020. p.5.
4 Shira Wolfe, “The Art and Legacy of the Spiral Group,” Artland Magazine, https://magazine.artland.com/the-life-and-legacy-of-the-spiral-group/.
5 Richard Mayhew, “Richard Mayhew: Painting Mindscapes and Searching for Sensitivity” conducted by Bridget Cooks and Amanda Tewes in 2019, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, under the auspices of the J. Paul Getty Trust, 2020. p.65.
6 Richard Mayhew, “Richard Mayhew: Painting Mindscapes and Searching for Sensitivity” conducted by Bridget Cooks and Amanda Tewes in 2019, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, under the auspices of the J. Paul Getty Trust, 2020. p.67.
7 Rachel Berenson Perry, “Felrath Hines-Bio,” Gavin Spanierman, https://gavinspanierman.squarespace.com/bio.
8 KQED-FM, “This Week: Richard Mayhew” YouTube, 12 Dec. 2009 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jj1W_EsFImQ
9 David Adams Cleveland, “What Is Tonalism? (12 Essential Characteristics),” Artsy, https://www.artsy.net/article/david-adams-cleveland-what-is-tonalism-12-essential-characteristics.
10 SF MoMA, “Richard Mayhew: ‘What Color is Love?’” YouTube, 30 Nov. 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBiddIDb1Vc.
11 Soumya Karlamangla, “What Makes California the Most Biodiverse State in the Nation” The New York Times, April, 17, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/17/us/california-biodiversity-conservation.html
12 The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, “Current Emergency Incidents”, http://fire.ca.gov/incidents
13 https://www.culturetype.com/2024/04/03/richard-mayhew-at-100-artistic-community-pays-tribute-to-one-of-americas-most-important-landscape-painters/