Renowned as one of America’s most important landscape painters, Richard Mayhew died on September 26, 2024. He was 100. Mayhew was born in Amityville, New York, in 1924, to a father of Montaukett/Shinnecock descent and a mother who was African-American and Cherokee-Lumbee. He loved art as a boy, and after a stint in the U.S. Marines he began art study in New York City. An educator and illustrator as well as an artist, Mayhew relocated to California in 2000, where he painted in oils and watercolor. He called his landscapes “mindscapes,” and their rich, saturated color reads as ecstasy. “Understory” surveys Mayhew’s work between 1960—when the artist studied color theory in Florence, Paris, and Amsterdam—and 2023, the year before his death. Throughout those seven decades, Mayhew saw his practice as an artistic reclamation of the land stolen from his Black, Shinnecock, and Cherokee-Lumbee ancestors. “I’m painting Forty Acres and a Mule,” he explained, “I’m painting the treaty land that was never honored for Native Americans.” —Laura Jacobs