SIMONE KRUG: You’ve long been fascinated by the broadly defined notion of American culture and Americana. Can you tell us about the premise and evolution of your decades-long project My American Dream? How does Rocky Mountain High both square with and deviate from this material?
KEITH MAYERSON: The My American Dream series began after 9/11. I witnessed the historic tragedy in person with my husband, Andrew Madrid, in SoHo, and then again with my students at NYU. Instead of the “Bush is bad” paintings that some of my contemporaries were doing in response, I wanted to focus on what my husband (who is Latino and part Indigenous) and I love about America: its civil rights heroes, cultural icons, landscapes, history, and communities, all of which promote democracy, understanding, empathy, and compassion among all peoples—especially those who aren’t “like you.” We can preserve and protect the future of our country while working toward peaceful harmony.
Coming from comics, all of my shows are installations of nonlinear narratives where the paintings talk to one another the way panels in a comic strip do, and each show is another chapter of the über-long graphic novel that is My American Dream. I grew up in Colorado, where it truly feels like the personal is the political and home is where the heart is, so Rocky Mountain High is the most personal of all these chapters.
SK: What sets Colorado apart for you? You grew up in the suburbs of Denver, and the exhibition feels like a love letter of sorts to that place.
KM: In the summer, we would hike and enjoy the wilderness. In the winter, we would go skiing every weekend, first taking lessons at the Eskimo Ski Club at Winter Park and then at Copper Choppers at Copper Mountain, where my family had a condo from fifth grade through college graduation. Aspen was four hours away, and it was like Xanadu to us. We knew it had the best skiing in all of Colorado, especially the moguls at Aspen Highlands when I was a teen. Hunter S. Thompson and his illustrator, Ralph Steadman, were huge artistic and intellectual influences on me growing up, as was John Denver, who was always playing on our 8-track tape player and television. Aspen has been a North Star for me. All of these creators were successful in their practices, but they also had a moral compass to make the world a better place.
Aspen Skiing founder Walter Paepcke and his wife, Elizabeth, created a space where individuals could pursue the art of living by combining healthy mountain sports and physical activity with art, music, aesthetics, and philosophy for the betterment of personal and collective spirits—for the community, nations, for everyone. This postwar “Aspen Idea” trickled down to us in Denver while we were growing up, when I didn’t have much access to fine art. Comics and music were my ways of accessing culture then. I was a tween Deadhead and a punk rocker, going to Wax Trax Records downtown and to all-ages shows, and coming of age at Red Rocks. One of my first jobs out of college was working at the front desk of a blue-chip gallery on 57th Street in NYC—Robert Miller Gallery (where John Cheim and Howard Read were directors before they left to open their own gallery). They would tell me that I didn’t have to be so nice to everybody who came in. I’d reply, “I can’t help it. I’m from Colorado!”
SK: You paint from the images in your surroundings—family photographs, album covers, archival stills, pop cultural icons in cartoons. I see your practice as a rumination on contemporary image-making and image proliferation; it’s like you’re making work at the tail end of the Pictures Generation, even though you are decidedly of a different artistic movement. Could you expand on your process and how you approach your subjects?
KM: I was a semiotics and studio art major as an undergraduate at Brown in the late 1980s, and then I went to grad school at UC Irvine in the early 1990s. At Irvine, I was in a program about gender and identity politics and theory, with room to breathe for beauty, transcendence, and the sublime. The Pictures Generation artists were a huge influence on my postmodern world, but so was seeing Mike Kelley’s first shows, with his stuffed animals on blankets. The art of David Wojnarowicz and others during the AIDS crisis really impacted me as well. In the post-postmodern world, Warhol and Richter can be influences to build upon and change.
I love the Old Masters, and I wonder if you can make work now that has cultural relevance, like Warhol’s, but with the warmth, life, and painterly humanity of a Rembrandt. If Richter paints the surface of a photograph without penetrating it, how can you go further, using photography as a jumping-off point to penetrate it further, like Bonnard and Vuillard, or even Cézanne did in his Mont Sainte-Victoires?
The image I’m working from is a map for my unconscious to play on, with each image like a Proustian madeleine to send my thoughts in the brain yoga of painting into revery. My brush is extending to the future, and my consciousness is driving it—but my unconscious is driving it, too. How it’s not like the photograph is what is me about the work: Picasso said, if you draw a circle without the aid of a compass, its imperfection is your style. I bring subconscious worlds to life by trying to break into the surrealities of my imagination. That’s what gives the works a life of their own. The comic-strip layout of my shows then puts the narrative into the hands of the viewer, sometimes leading to an ineffable “third meaning” in the context of our time.
SK: Snoopy is a central figure in your practice and in this exhibition. What draws you to Snoopy and other symbols of a particular era of Americana?
KM: I love Charles Schulz and the whole Peanuts gang, and, of course, Snoopy was the joie de vivre star. I grew up reading the comics and book collections and religiously watching the animated specials on network TV. The night Schulz died, he came to me in a dream. He was wearing a Mister Rogers–style cardigan and his grandfather-style glasses. He told me he was happy that I was teaching and promoting comics and carrying the torch.
Of course, it was probably all just in my imagination, but it felt prescient and moved me. I still teach both fine art and comics today. In addition to teaching painting, drawing, and MFA fine art graduate students, I created the Visual Narrative Art program at the USC Roski School of Art and Design after twenty-five years of being the head comics teacher and “cartooning coordinator” at the School of Visual Arts in New York (while also, during this period, teaching fine art at NYU, Columbia, Brown, Yale, and Brooklyn College).
Anthropomorphized animals are the ultimate icons that people can relate to. I teach what I consider to be my bible: Scott McCloud’s 1993 book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. McCloud describes sitting in classes with Art Spiegelman and being able to “suture into the icon,” like an avatar in a role-playing game, and transcending into other worlds. Snoopy was the fantasy hero for Schulz, not his wishy-washy Charlie Brown. Snoopy enabled the creator to go to other worlds, become “Joe Cool,” and live life to the fullest, with sly and spiritual commentary about the state of the world and people. Snoopy is a conduit, a traveler, a pilgrim. In my first-ever sculpture—which is in Rocky Mountain High—I painted him with stars in his eyes and his being constituted by the celestial heavens, his puffy jacket depicting the Northwestern and Eastern Hemispheres as seen on Google Earth. In conjunction with a panorama of paintings from my own photos, which, together, I hope create an almost Japanese-screen effect, it’s as if Snoopy stepped out from the heavens because he was worried about our world, but is pacing forward with determination and spirit.
SK: Tell us about your fascination with the avant-garde histories of Aspen. What’s your research process for a work like Fourth of July, Aspen, Colorado, 1971, for example?
KM: When I appropriated the Henri Cartier-Bresson photograph Fourth of July, Aspen, Colorado, 1971, I was also reading books about the Aspen area, learning about the confluence of hippie encampments here. Beyond studying Cartier-Bresson, his history, strategies, and influences, I listened to the hit songs of 1971, both the pop that would have been playing on the radio and the music that hippies might have been loving and dancing to then. I remember seeing these people grace our world when I was five years old, and they still inspire me to envision freedom in the future and to bring my work to life with color using my painterly brush. Their perspective was an extension of the Aspen Idea.
For the other works, I listened to interviews with Hunter S. Thompson and recordings of his books, which brought me back to fifth grade, when I was first turned on to him, and to think back on all the amazing qualities and his moral compass seen in his transgressive writings and what he means to journalism today. I listened to recordings of all the Dead shows I attended, in addition to all of their Red Rocks concerts. When I wasn’t painting, I watched their documentaries and read their biographies. I tried to capture the essence of their greatness, listening to one another to create cosmological music, which is a spiritual communal happening. For John Denver and the Muppets, I listened to him narrating and watched his interviews and concerts while painting (along with watching and listening to the Muppets!). Singer-songwriters from the 1970s were very much my playlist in the studio for this show, but so were Billie Holiday and Dixieland jazz and period music. I played the best music of 1946 to channel the spirit of the Red Onion gang and, for their picture, music the miners might have listened to in the late 1800s.
SK: This show also includes images of the town’s most iconic vistas and maps. Tell us about how you approach Aspen’s landscape.
KM: I grew up with the famous ski maps by Bill C. Brown, and James Niehues, who took over after Brown retired. I was always drawn to the idealized blue-sky worlds that they represented; it was amazing to be riding the lifts and look at a reproduced utopic painting to figure out which slope to ski next. I also grew up going to the Denver Art
Museum and seeing their Western art collection, with works by Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, Charles Russell, and Frederic Remington, in addition to the Taos school—Georgia O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, and Robert Henri. And of course, I love the irony of Ed Ruscha’s, Mark Tansey’s, and other contemporary artists’ mountainous takes on would-be Hudson River School artists.
For this show, I tried to open up the 1980 Bill C. Brown poster of idealized Aspen to make it look like an oil-painted landscape that could truly be a window onto another world in the same scale as one of the DAM historical works, and then, next to this simulacrum, place a large panorama based on an Aspen Skiing Company image I saw reproduced in a banner at the Aspen Mountain ticket office, showing the four mountains as they appear in a photograph taken from a helicopter. I did my take on this photograph by bringing it into a modernist other world, listening to Brideshead Revisited and A Boy’s Own Story, novels that helped me to bring about my own queer coming of age, my own symbolic mountains to climb.
SK: This exhibition is nostalgic in many ways: you also present paintings based on your family’s vacation photos from the 1970s. You lost your mother, Lois Mayerson, recently, and you’ve dedicated the show to her honor and memory.
KM: It’s been a time machine to my own past, memories, and psychological formation. I tell my students that when they are painting, they should be making visual talismans for things that are important to them in the real world. The composition comes together in front of them, and, hopefully, it will be like waking up from a dream, and the epiphanies will help them in their own lives and well-being. The act of painting is a mind/body connection that comes close to skiing. When we’re skiing or long-distance driving or any other meditative activity, we’re working through our issues while going through the motions.
The last time I really skied Aspen was for my dad’s sixtieth birthday, when I was in my second year of grad school, working on my thesis project. I was going out with Andrew, who’s now my husband of thirty-five years, and my adult life was starting to mature. Now that I’ll be turning sixty myself during this show, I realize how short life really is and how we need to make the most of every moment, a feeling that’s deepened for me with my mom’s passing. For the final suite of Aspen view paintings, created after my mother’s passing, I listened almost exclusively to Ella Fitzgerald—one of my mother’s favorite performers—feeling as if I were dancing with her in her nondenominational heaven.
Keith Mayerson’s exhibition My American Dream (Rocky Mountain High) is on view at Aspen Art Museum from March 22 to May 31.
About the Artist
Keith Mayerson (b. 1966, Cincinnati, Ohio) lives and works in Riverside, CA. He studied Semiotics and Studio Art at Brown University in the 1980s and received an MFA from University of California, Irvine. He is a tenured professor of art at the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California, where he has also created a visual narrative art program. Mayerson’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia; American University Museum of Art, Washington, DC; Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Massachusetts; UC Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, California; RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island; Fairfield University Museum, Connecticut; Rennie Museum, Vancouver; and the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami. His graphic novel Horror Hospital Unplugged, made with the writer Dennis Cooper, was published in 1996 by Juno Books. Mayerson is currently creating a graphic-novel biography of James Dean to be published by Fantagraphics, and was co-editor of the 2024 Frank Johnson: Secret Pioneer of American Comics Vol. 1, from the same publisher.