Richard Mayhew, Love Bush, 2000
oil on canvas 47x51 inches
The Art of Richard Mayhew will represent three separate exhibitions organized chronologically and presented concurrently at three San Francisco Bay Area institutions: the de Saisset Museum, the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), and the Museum of Art and History in Santa Cruz. Together, the three presentations will provide a complete retrospective exhibition for Richard Mayhew, a nationally recognized, Aptos-based painter.
The exhibition of Mayhew's work at MoAD will be the first part of a three-part chronological retrospective of the artist's career. In this exhibition, Mayhew's paintings from the late 1950's through the 1970's, consisting primarily of landscape with some figurative works will be featured. In 1957, Mayhew enjoyed his first solo exhibition as an academically trained artist and announced his unique style of presenting the natural milieu to the New York art world. During the tumultuous period of social and cultural transformation of the 1960s, Mayhew worked as an artist and an activist most notably as a founding member of Spiral, the legendary group of Black artists including Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, and Hale Woodruff, organized in 1963 to address issues of civil rights and racial equality through their art.
Through the 1960s and 1970s, Mayhew establishes his career as an artist tirelessly working with a sense of spiritual depth and freedom of color, form, and space. The MoAD exhibition will explore the personal and professional foundations of Mayhew’s style as a young man of African and Native American descent coming of age in New York during the 1950s explosion of Abstract Expressionist art.
It will gather together the best of Mayhew's paintings that combine his unique style, philosophy for painting, and synthesis of artistic and social influences that set the trajectory of his artistic career.
Acts of Faith and Intervention: Bryan Wiley
January 22, 2010 – April 30, 2010
Bryan Wiley, Hanging crosses in Candomble shop, 2006
Senhor do Bonfim, Brazil
Bryan Wiley is a photojournalist who has traveled the Atlantic Black diaspora documenting altars and ritual practices by African descendants and in doing so, illuminates continuities in beliefs and customs of descendants of former slave populations. Wiley uses the concept of altar (a high place of veneration) as a vehicle for intersections in art and history. Altars, in many cultures represent sites of ritual communication that often open a pathway to divine consciousness with the supernatural world. They also act as a place of public social interaction and intervention that explores disruption and continuity of African peoples and their descendants.
Wiley has assembled his photographs of altar objects from Brazil, Haiti, Cuba, South Carolina and New Orleans into large ornate frames creating collages that reveal the blurred lines between sacred and secular worlds. Wiley’s assembled images focus on the power of the natural elements, earth, wind, fire, and water as manifest in the deities venerated in the altars. Large photographs of the physical locales and the surrounding landscapes contextualize his interpretive installations creating a quiet atmosphere of reverence. Wiley reveals that the process of visiting the countries, gaining access to the rituals and ceremonies has profoundly impacted his art practice, “Since I’ve been on this journey, I have listened to my spiritual voice more” said Wiley.
