![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/My-Family--2013-copy.jpg\")
Keith Mayerson, \u201cMy Family\u201d (2013), oil on linen (photo Tom Powel Imaging, courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art, New York)<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 which stand alone in what he calls his abstract \u201ciconscapes\u201d \u2014 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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 Architecture 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)<\/a> at the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado and My American Dream: Capturing a Glimpse of Lee & Jackson, Elaine & Bill and Their Circle<\/a> at the Pollock-Krasner House in East Hampton, New York.<\/p>\n Hyperallergic: I know you come from the cartooning world and grew up in Colorado. Can you tell me about early influences and exposure to art and artmaking?<\/p>\n Keith Mayerson: I grew up in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado, and I was fortunate to be able to spend the weekends in the mountains, skiing and hiking. My access to art as a kid was through comics. I was cartooning from kindergarten all the way through college. The books by Hunter S. Thompson, illustrated by cartoonist Ralph Steadman, were a huge influence on me \u2014 though I was too young to be reading them. I came of age at Red Rocks, and I was a tween Deadhead, the only gay Deadhead I knew.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Muppets also affected me deeply. Jim Henson was a cultural creator who was working for the betterment of the world. Along with entertaining, he was educating in terms of promoting harmony between different people. As egocentric and wacky as the Muppets may be, they have compassion for one another and their community.\u00a0<\/p>\n Charles Schulz is a total hero, for many of the same reasons. He was very spiritual, and he wanted to create a world where the different characters understood one another. There are the different archetypes: Linus, who was philosophical; Snoopy, representing a joie de vivre; and Charlie Brown, the everyman. Lucy and Peppermint Patty were strong female protagonists.\u00a0<\/p>\n H: You studied at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, before coming to New York City. Can you tell me about that period of time?<\/p>\n KM: I was a semiotics and studio art major at Brown, thinking of being a New Yorker cartoonist. I also studied acting, playwriting, and directing. After school, I came to New York and started submitting 10 cartoons a week. One day, I brought a cartoon to Lee Lorenz, the art director and cartoon director at the New Yorker. I said, \u201cYou know, Mr. Lorenz, this is our silver anniversary. I just handed you my 100th cartoon, and thank you for your feedback.\u201d He said, \u201cWell, George Booth submitted 10 cartoons a week for 10 years before he got his first one in. I\u2019m not saying it takes that many, but it helps!\u201d I walked out with a heavy head, realizing being a cartoonist is just as hard as being a fine artist. I realized I was interested in bringing up aesthetic ideas, more than just making people laugh, so I decided to follow my interests and pursue fine art.\u00a0<\/p>\n By then, I was working at the front desk at Robert Miller Gallery. They showed Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Yayoi Kusama, Gilbert and George, and, importantly, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Robert Mapplethorpe, who were my heroes and had just died.\u00a0<\/p>\n H: What was your experience like at the University of California, Irvine, where you got your MFA? I know the work from your thesis exhibition ended up traveling and being shown at galleries in San Francisco and New York. What was this early work about?\u00a0<\/p>\n KM: I went back to school at UC Irvine, which was a great school. I had come out as a person, but I was still coming out intellectually. At UC Irvine in the early 1990s, the focus was on gender and identity politics, but there was also space for transcendence and beauty and feeling.<\/p>\n My thesis show was a project called Pinocchio the Big Fag. It was a series of drawings with a narrative \u2014 a parallel universe to the real Pinocchio. One of my professor\u2019s friends was Rick Jacobsen, who was opening a gallery in San Francisco called Kiki, a tiny storefront space. My professor, Catherine Lord, had spoken about linear presentations being very straight, White, and patriarchal. So when I was invited to show the work at Kiki, I made it a big salon presentation, and have kept doing non-linear narrative installations ever since.<\/p>\n H: You also challenged the audience in early exhibitions when you showed abstractions alongside figurative work. Why did you decide to combine them? Can you talk about the significance of your abstract work?<\/p>\n KM: I had an early solo show at Jay Gorney, back when my mentor and teacher, Lari Pittman, was showing there. I showed paintings and drawings, mixing abstraction that I call \u201ciconscapes\u201d next to figurative paintings. By that time, I was appropriating different styles for content. I was reading the John Richardson biography of Picasso, and realizing that Picasso made a still life one day, a Cubist painting the next, and a portrait the next.<\/p>\n In the iconscapes, I wanted to get to the core of what was building the life of my paintings. I think there are sublimated icons in our unconscious. I wanted to try to bring them out in a more three-dimensional space.<\/p>\n Being the son of a psychoanalyst, I love the idea of C\u00e9zanne painting his landscapes of Mont Sainte-Victoire. I think about him, living on a trust fund, not focused on selling his paintings, hiking up the same hills to paint as he did with \u00c9mile Zola as a child and thinking, \u201cI love my dad; I hate my dad; this painting is done; I\u2019m on to my next one!\u201d His subconscious was also mapping onto the landscapes. If you look at C\u00e9zanne\u2019s paintings, in fragmented parts, you can find figures and even his face.\u00a0<\/p>\n I think about the way that Brian Wilson, in his song \u201cCaroline No,\u201d makes a sound like a baby\u2019s wail when he sings the word \u201ccry.\u201d The signified and signifier are fused together. With my iconscapes, I tried to get to the core. Like the Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist artists who desired to access and depict the unconscious, I wanted to rip the mask off the signifier and just deal with the signified.<\/p>\n H: How did you begin your project My American Dream, and how would you describe a project representing your personal heroes?<\/p>\n KM: My American Dream began after 9\/11. I was living in New York and teaching at New York University (NYU) that morning. We all witnessed it and were in shock; obviously, it was deeply affecting. In the months that followed, I noticed some of my friends were making what I call \u201c[George W.] Bush is Bad\u201d paintings.<\/p>\n I began to realize that I wanted to make things that made me feel good \u2014 the positive aspects of life in our country. My husband, Andrew, is Latino and part Indigenous. I was thinking about our great civil rights leaders and heroes, cultural icons, as well as landscapes, family scenes, and environments. All of these helped shape our progressive political and cultural thinking. I was hoping that if I make work that brightens my spirit and elevates me, hopefully it will for the viewer, too. It is especially important right now, in this time when democracy is under threat. When I show the work, I think of it as one chapter in an ongoing narrative and collective whole.<\/p>\n H: One of your latest chapters is Rocky Mountain High, on view at the Aspen Art Museum. Does Aspen represent a homecoming for you?<\/p>\n KM: Aspen was sort of a Xanadu for us, growing up near Denver. It was expensive and far away. But there was something about the Aspen idea, which was a concept created by Elizabeth and Walter Paepcke, which we really felt. It was about mountain sports meeting philosophy and music, and the enrichment of the human and collective spirit.\u00a0<\/p>\n I had taken photographs on the mountain during a blizzard, and was painting pictures that I thought were going to look like Caspar David Friedrichs. Because my mother had recently passed, I was listening to her favorite music, like Ella Fitzgerald. The paintings became light and heavenly. They felt like I was dancing with mom. Eyes and faces would appear in the skies, and I just let them be. When you’re channeling those memories and spirits, something extra comes out.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n H: You have also continued the project by representing the women of Abstract Expressionism in your current exhibition at the Pollock-Krasner House and your 2019 residency at the Elaine de Kooning House. Can you talk about the significance of Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning for you?\u00a0<\/p>\n KM: I think the Abstract Expressionist movement was led by women. It would not have happened without Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning. They defied the conventions of the conservative times of the 1930s, \u201940s, and \u201950s. Lee Krasner was already a well-established artist before she met Pollock; she had been one of Hans Hofmann’s best students. When it was totally uncool to do figurative painting, Elaine de Kooning was painting portraits of men. She called them her \u201cgyroscope men.\u201d She messed with their faces and painted their legs splayed open. They are vulnerable; she had power over their representation.\u00a0<\/p>\n H: I heard you talk about the importance of love in painting during a panel discussion at Eric Firestone Gallery in New York, which made a big impression on me. How is love a central ingredient in your work?<\/p>\n KM: If you want to make a work that has a life of its own, love is an important component. When you have a meaningful connection with something that’s ineffable, that is the secret sauce of alchemy. All of my images are like Proustian madeleines that send me into a reverie of meditation and mindfulness. Manet said that what painters have in our favor is memories. I think about Frankenstein\u2019s monster. Sometimes, artists and creators make this thing that walks and talks and has a life of its own. I think that comes from love.<\/p>\n Jim Henson was able to alchemize Kermit, who’s just a piece of cloth, with his hand sticking up its butt. Charles Schulz transcends into Snoopy to bring him to life. They were suturing into the avatar of these iconic characters. It spilled out into their creation, and gave it an amazing life that extends beyond themselves.<\/p>\n I am trying to humanize the people that I’m depicting. I think about marrying the cultural relevance of a Warhol with the qualities in Rembrandt\u2019s portraits: empathy, compassion, warmth, and painterliness.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/PEANUTS-SKATING-UNDER-COSMIC-SKY-ASPEN.jpg\")
Keith Mayerson, \u201cPeanuts Skating Under the Cosmic Sky (Dwarf Galaxy Wolf\u2013Lundmark\u2013Melotte Captured by the James Webb Space Telescope)\u201d (2025), oil on linen (image courtesy the artist and Karma)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Irascables-small-powel.jpg\")
Keith Mayerson, \u201cThe Irascibles\u201d (2019), oil on linen, from Nina Leen’s eponymous 1950 photograph for LIFE depicting artists including Barnett Newman (bottom right), Hedda Sterne (back row), and Jackson Pollock (center middle row) (image courtesy the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/HUNTER-THOMPSON-FOR-HY.jpg\")
Keith Mayerson, \u201cHunter S. Thompson, 1990 (After Paul Harris)\u201d (2025), oil on linen (image courtesy the artist and Karma)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/LARGE-ICONSCAPE--THROUGH-THE-WOODS--POWEL.jpg\")
Keith Mayerson, \u201cLarge Iconscape #5 (through the woods)\u201d (2019), oil on linen (image courtesy the artist and Karma)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/My-Prometheus-Elaine-and-her-JFK-s--powel--small-.jpg\")
Keith Mayerson, \u201cMy Prometheus: E de K and her JFK\u2019s\u201d (2019), oil on linen\u00a0(image courtesy the artist)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Husbands--Andrew-and-I---2012-FOR-HY.jpg\")
Keith Mayerson, \u201cHusbands (Andrew and I)\u201d (2011), oil on linen\u00a0(image courtesy the artist)<\/p>\n