Mayhew was a founding member of Spiral, a collective of African-American artists that exhibited together one time only, in 1965 and was started to fight racial inequality through art. His style was greatly influenced during the 1950s explosion of Abstract Expressionist art and he enjoyed early success with a solo exhibition in a New York gallery in 1957. “An artist really develops not just from a class situation but from an association of artists around you,” Mayhew has said. “What I got from Abstract Expressionism is that it’s really improvisation. It has to do with that spontaneous moment.” Mayhew has been labeled an American Impressionist, a neo-Barbizon, a romantic Realist and a painter of Expressionistic landscapes but he rejects being put in any category. MoAD curator, Bridget Cooks, calls Mayhew “one of America’s most important abstract landscape artists of the 20th century. He masterfully follows and breaks the rules of color theory to engage and manipulate viewers’ encounters with his fantasy environments.”