Richard Mayhew

Richard Mayhew was born on April 3, 1924, in Amityville, New York, of Black and Native American descent. He studied at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, the Art Students League of New York, Pratt Institute, and Columbia University. By his own account, artists of his generation trained at art academies rather than through university degree programs, and none of the available biographical sources document a completed degree from any of these institutions.

His first solo exhibition opened at the Brooklyn Museum in 1955, followed by a second in 1957 at the Morris Gallery in Greenwich, Connecticut. In 1959 he won the John Hay Whitney Fellowship, which funded a year of study at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze. Around 1963 he became a member of Spiral, the New York collective of Black artists that also included Romare Bearden and Hale Woodruff; the group held its only joint exhibition in 1965. He was elected to the National Academy of Design around 1970, described by his galleries as among its youngest members ever inducted.

Mayhew taught for decades, including at the Art Students League, Pratt Institute, the Brooklyn Museum Art School, Hunter College, and Smith College, before joining the faculty of Pennsylvania State University, where he later became Professor Emeritus. In 1978 the Studio Museum in Harlem mounted a retrospective, "Richard Mayhew: An American Abstractionist." He eventually settled in Soquel, near Santa Cruz, California, where he continued to paint into his final years. Richard Mayhew died at his home in Soquel, California, on September 26, 2024, at the age of 100.

Mayhew's landscapes were consistently read by curators and institutions as a distinct strand within postwar American abstraction, one that fused Abstract Expressionist color handling with a personal, non-topographical sense of place. His membership in Spiral placed him inside the foundational conversation among Black American artists in the 1960s about abstraction and political identity, and gallery materials describe further inclusion in major surveys of Black American art, though specific venues and dates for those later inclusions could not be independently confirmed for this profile. His election to the National Academy of Design around 1970 and a 1978 retrospective at the Studio Museum in Harlem confirmed early institutional regard, and later solo presentations at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco and the Heckscher Museum of Art extended that recognition across his lifetime. No verbatim critical assessment could be confirmed against a named critic and outlet for this profile, though the recurring institutional framing treats his "mindscapes" as a serious, sustained contribution to American landscape abstraction rather than a regional or decorative sideline.

Mayhew's auction market has been comparatively thin. His current auction record is Essence (1975), which sold for USD 266,700 at Sotheby's New York on November 19, 2025, about fourteen months after his death. Other high results include Guardian, which sold for USD 252,000 at Phillips (exact sale date not confirmed), and Scarlet Journey (2006), which sold for USD 249,000 at Swann Galleries on April 2, 2026. His work is currently represented by two New York galleries, ACA Galleries, which worked with the artist and now his estate for nearly thirty years, and Venus Over Manhattan, which announced its representation in 2023 and mounted a posthumous solo exhibition of his watercolors within weeks of his death. Karma exhibited a further solo presentation, "Understory," at its Los Angeles space in 2026.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Mayhew, so provenance and authentication rely on his representing galleries, ACA Galleries and Venus Over Manhattan, both of which have handled his estate since 2024. His auction history is comparatively short, with a current high of USD 266,700 set in November 2025, and prices have moved upward since his death as institutional attention and gallery programming have increased. Collectors should treat any single auction result with some caution given the limited number of public sales, and should confirm current representation and estate status directly with ACA Galleries or Venus Over Manhattan before a purchase.