Beer With a Painter: Keith Mayerson
“I wanted to rip the mask off the signifier and just deal with the signified,” said the cartoonist-turned-painter who depicts a cosmology of American identity and activism.
LOS ANGELES — Keith Mayerson drops into any conversation with intensity, referencing athletes, the Beach Boys, Roland Barthes, and Paul Cézanne in long breathless sentences. The Los Angeles-based artist is best known for his ongoing cosmology of paintings that make up the My American Dream series, often presented in “chapters” and drawing from a combination of his own photographs and found photography. Begun in the aftermath of 9/11, the paintings depict an omnivorous personal pantheon of heroes.
I recall his work in the 2014 Whitney Biennial: a salon-style, floor-to-ceiling corner installation at the Breuer building. Among the subjects were Martin Luther King Jr., Sitting Bull, Superman, Marvin Gaye, James Dean, Annie Oakley, Kermit the Frog, and Tintin, complete with a sparkling Castafiore emerald. Interspersed were a couple of abstractions, cityscapes of New York and Los Angeles, a view of Earth from outer space, and a double portrait of his husband and himself. “My Family,” (2013) showed his family of origin — Keith as a child with his sister, mother, and father — lying together under a patterned bedspread watching television. The patterns became a metaphor for interwoven networks of community and family.
Mayerson grew up near Denver, Colorado. He made his art-world debut with drawings from his thesis show, referencing comics and children's book illustrations, when they were presented in a group exhibition at the Drawing Center in New York. He also presented a queer Hamlet narrative in a salon-style installation at Derek Eller Gallery. Mayerson lived and worked in the city from the mid-1990s until 2016, when he moved full-time to Southern California.
Known for his figurative cosmology of American identity, activist history, and popular culture, Mayerson creates work distinguished by its humming, vibratory painting style: swirling, repeating brushmarks that pulse with life and feeling. These forms — which stand alone in what he calls his abstract “iconscapes” — provide an important counterpoint to the appropriated photographic sources he uses and his often acid-yellow underpainting. His work envisions an aspirational, enthusiastic now, as much as it speaks to a nostalgic, utopian past.
Mayerson was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1966 and received a BA from Brown University and an MFA from the University of California (UC), Irvine. He lives in Riverside, California, and is a professor in the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Two exhibitions of his work are currently on view: Keith Mayerson: My American Dream (Rocky Mountain High) at the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado and My American Dream: Capturing a Glimpse of Lee & Jackson, Elaine & Bill and Their Circle at the Pollock-Krasner House in East Hampton, New York.
