In the GRI oral history, Mayhew said his ancestry was a mixture of African American and Native American, including Shinnecock and Cherokee-Lumbee, but he often didn’t identify as the latter for much of his life “because every time I mentioned [being Native American], it was rejected. So I lived my life as African American,” he said.
Later in life, Mayhew would say that his desire to paint within a landscape mode came from both parts of this ancestry. “That combination is why I paint landscape as nature, probably,” he said in the SFMOMA interview. “In terms of Afro-American and Native American, their blood is in the soil of the United States.”
Mayhew served in the Marines during World War II and was eventually awarded the Special Congressional Medal of Honor. (His first wife, Dorothy Zuccarini, who passed away in 2015, was “the one who discovered and pursued Rick’s right to be awarded” the medal, according to a preface to the oral history by their daughter, Ina Mayhew.)
After his service, he spent time in Europe, visiting the continent’s various museums, with stops in Paris, Amsterdam, and Germany. He moved to New York upon his return to the US in 1947, at the age of 23. Around this time, he began his formal education in art history and art-making, taking courses at Columbia University, the Brooklyn Museum School of Art, and Pratt Institute, as well as the Art Students League, though he wasn’t officially enrolled there. Among his teachers during this era were American painters Edwin Dickinson and Reuben Tam. Mayhew received his first solo show at the Brooklyn Museum in 1955.
Mayhew would further his studies in Europe in the late ’50s and early ’60s, first by winning a John Hay Whitney Fellowship in 1959, which funded a year of studies at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence, and then receiving a grant from the Ford Foundation, which allowed him to stay in Europe, where he also studied at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
Mayhew also began teaching early on his career, which would become a life-long dedication. He taught at the Brooklyn Museum School of Art and the Art Students League, where he studied, as well as at Smith College and Pennsylvania State University. He taught at Penn State for 14 years, retiring in 1991 as a professor emeritus.
