Natasha Mayers
War Chest Series: Tattoos on Wounded Torso, Acrylic on canvas, 24” x 18”
Natasha Mayers has been called “the most committed activist artist in Maine”. She is widely known for her work supervising more than 600 school and community murals from Maine to Nicaragua and El Salvador. Natasha encourages creative approaches to community concerns, to demonstrate how people’s involvement in the arts can improve the quality of community life. The painted utility poles in her town which depict local history were featured in Lucy Lippard’s book, The Lure of the Local. For Natasha, the painted poles represented art by the community, about the community, and for the community, empowering a community to portray and know itself. For the past 35 years she has been creating parade “floats” for the local Whitefield 4th of July parade.
She has been a Touring Artist with the Maine Arts Commission Artist-in-Residency Program since 1975. She has taught students from nursery school to college and in diverse populations: immigrants, refugees, prisoners, the homeless, and the “psychiatrically labeled”, with whom she has worked since 1981, and has organized many exhibits of their artwork.
Natasha was awarded the Individual Artist’s Fellowship from the Maine Arts Commission in 1998, the Artists Projects: New Forms Award from New England Foundation for the Arts, and the Zorach scholarship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1976. Natasha was selected to be the “Millennium Artist” for the State of Ohio, in the national residency program (a White House/National Endowment for the Arts project), Artists and Communities: America Creates for the Millennium (one artist was chosen for each state). She worked for three months in Portsmouth, Ohio, with young people and elders to create a series of works on utility poles and highway columns and walls exploring local views of identity, values, and sense of place.
She is a long-time member of Union of Maine Visual Artists, and has worked with this statewide artists' organization and other interested artists organizing exhibits on the themes of homelessness, Columbus and the New World Order, militarization, economic conversion, mental illness, etc.. Natasha founded ARRT!, (the Artists' Rapid Response Team) in 2012, and co-founded and is editor- in-chief of the Maine Arts Journal: Union of Maine Visual Artists Quarterly.
Natasha has been exhibiting work since 1976, often exploring themes of peace and social justice. Her work was shown in 2003, at the Portland Museum of Art, Mapping Maine: Four Contemporary Views (Jacquette, Cady, Hopkins, Mayers), and at Aucocisco Gallery in Portland (her Endless War maps). She showed her Bankster series at SPACE Gallery in Portland, and in 2015 had a show at the Maine Jewish Museum of her Men in Suits paintings, reviewed in Hyperallergic, followed by Men in Suits/Men in Trouble exhibit (with Kenny Cole) at Harlow Gallery in 2018.
Her portrait was painted by Robert Shetterly as part of his Americans Who Tell the Truth series (www.americanswhotellthetruth.org), with these words of hers: “We need artists to help explain what is happening in this country, to tell the truth and reveal the lies, to be willing to say the emperor has no clothes, to create moral indignation, to envision alternatives, to reinvent language. We need artists to help us come together and share our voices and build community around powerful issues concerning our roles in the world and our planet’s survival. Compassion must be translated into action.”
Statement
This War Chests series visualizes the President as an emperor, with or without clothes. The war chests are decorated with an array of medals, bars and stripes, epaulettes, braids, sashes, and tattoos. They are often headless, intoxicated with their own power, dangerous, blind, in a world full of violence toward one another and the planet, with men, historically, at the center of the problem. In these enraging times, the work reflects anger, frustration, a sense of the absurd, and analysis of what masculine power, white privilege and tradition have wrought. I talk about what is scary and threatening to me/us with a touch of irony, humor, pattern, exuberant color, and eccentricity.
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2015 Maine Jewish Museum, Men in Suits
2013 Space Gallery, Portland, Maine, World Banksters
2006 University of Maine at Lewiston-Auburn, Atrium, Signs of the Times
2005 University of Maine at Presque Isle, Bearing Witness
2003 Aucocisco Gallery, Portland, Maine, State of War map paintings
2001 Railroad Square, Waterville, Towards a regional road map of Maine
2000 Southern Ohio Museum, Portsmouth, Ohio, photographs of pole paintings and road map paintings
2000 Davidson and Daughters Gallery, Portland, Maine, Towards a regional
Road map of Maine
Selected Group Exhibitions
2016 Men in Suits, curated by Fran Kaufman, Long-Sharp Gallery Project, 24 West 57th St. NYC work by Frederick J Brown, Buster Cleveland, William John Kennedy, David Kramer, Natasha Mayers, Magali Nougarede, Christopher Orchard, Mark Wagner and Andy Warhol
2013 Maine Women Pioneers: World Vision, University of New England2013 Occuprint, ar/ge kunst Galerie Museum in Bolzano, Italy, Kunstverein
2012 Occupy Art! Union of Maine Visual Artists in Action, Harlow Gallery, Hallowell
2010 Pleased to Meet You, George Marshall Gallery, York
Awards
Great Spruce Head Island 2011, awarded fully-funded residency
Abbey Mural Workshop Fellowship, National Academy of Design, 2008
Education
1967 Sarah Lawrence College, BA, Academy of Art, Rome, Italy, junior year
1968 Antioch Graduate School of Education, Yellow Springs, Ohio, MAT in
Social sciences1974-6 Unity College, studied painting with Leonard Craig
1975 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture
Publications
Carl Little in HyperAllergic, June 13, 2015
Dan Kany, in the Portland Press Herald, May, 17, 2015
Beem, Edgar Alan ,Maine Art Now, Dog Ear Press, Gardiner,
Beem, Edgar, Maine Art New, Natasha Mayers, University of Maine at Orono Press, 2015
