Revisiting The Spiral Group

Spiral is one of the talked about artist collectives that formed in the 1960s to respond to the civil rights movement. Famous names in African-American art were members including Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, Charles Alston, Emma Amos, Richard Mayhew, Merton D. Simpson, and Hale Woodruff.

The group first came together on July 5, 1963, to discuss the current issues in American art, culture, and politics. They critiqued, mentored, and organized its first and only group show in 1965. They would dissolve a few years later.

This month the Romare Bearden Foundation commemorates the historic coming together of the Spiral Group, and its lasting significance. Our virtual conversation features Richard Mayhew, a painter and the last living member of the group, and Courtney J. Martin, art historian and director of the Yale Center for British Art. They will be joined by moderator Camara Dia Holloway, project manager of the Romare Bearden Digital Catalogue Raisonné.

About the participants

Richard Mayhew is an Afro-Native American landscape painter, illustrator, and arts educator. Mayhew has received numerous awards and grants including a John Hay Whitney Fellowship, a Ford Foundation grant, a Tiffany Foundation Award, and a National Academy of Design Merit Award. His work is collected by major museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. His most recent exhibition Richard Mayhew: Natural Order was at Venus Over Manhattan in New York City. The artist's recent show, "Richard Mayhew: Natural Order" at Venus Over Manhattan Gallery, consisted of 21 paintings and works on paper done between 1973 and 2022.

According to Mayhew, the Spiral group never really ceased to exist, but rather took on another form through the discussions among African American artists all across the United States today.

Courtney J. Martin is the Paul Mellon director of the Yale Center for British Art. Previously, she was the deputy director and chief curator at the Dia Art Foundation, taught at Brown University and the University of California, Berkeley, and worked at the Ford Foundation. In 2012, Martin curated Drop, Roll, Slide, Drip . . . Frank Bowling’s Poured Paintings 1973–1978 at Tate Britain. At Dia, she curated an exhibition of the painter Robert Ryman and oversaw exhibitions of works by Dan Flavin, Sam Gilliam, Blinky Palermo, Dorothea Rockburne, Keith Sonnier, and Andy Warhol. She co-edited Lawrence Alloway: Critic and Curator (Getty Publications, 2015, winner of the 2016 Historians of British Art Book Award) and edited Four Generations: The Joyner Giuffrida Collection of Abstract Art (Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2016). In 2015, she received an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. She received a doctorate from Yale University. She sits on the boards of the Chinati Foundation, the Center for Curatorial Leadership, Hauser & Wirth Institute, and the Henry Moore Foundation.

Martin published "From the Center: The Spiral Group 1963 - 1966" in Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art (Fall 2011) She conducted an interview with Spiral member Emma Amos as part of Romare Bearden in the Modernist Tradition symposium at Columbia College- Chicago in 2007.

Below left: Richard Mayhew; right: Courtney J. Martin Photograph by Mara Lavitt

Above: Camara Dia Holloway

Dr. Camara Dia Holloway is the Project Manager for the Romare Bearden Digital Catalogue Raisonné. Her research expertise is on twentieth century American and African American art, with special knowledge of African American photography and critical race art history. She is the founding co-Director of the Association of Critical Race Art History. Holloway’s graduate work was at Yale University and her undergraduate work at Barnard College. She has previously taught at the University of Delaware, the University of Southern California, Swarthmore College and Sarah Lawrence College. Holloway curated the exhibition, “Portraiture & the Harlem Renaissance: The Photographs of James L. Allen” at the Yale University Art Gallery in 1999, which rescued the Harlem Renaissance photographer from obscurity. Her most recent publication is the essay, “Dark Stars: Reinventing Blackness in the Interwar New York-London Circuit,” in the peer-reviewed journal American Art.

The Romare Bearden Foundation's Cinque Artists Program is named after the Cinque Gallery founded by artists Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, and Ernest Crichlow in the late 60s. The gallery served as a catalyst for artists and curators of color to exhibit, but also as a place for networking and building community. The Romare Bearden honors its legacy by providing a platform for artists to talk about their work, and to capture the stories that deepen our understanding of Romare Bearden's life.

www.beardenfoundation.org