Brochure Essay

This exhibition pays tribute to two outstanding African-American folk artists, Walter O. Mayo and his son, Walter L. Mayo, active members of the central Ohio African-American community during the twentieth century. Building on a fieldwork project conducted by Kenyon College students to document the Mayos' work, family, and spiritual lives, this exhibition places their art in a particular social and historical moment and place. In this way, we hope to connect the everyday experiences of these productive artists to the impressive body of work they created: masterful wood sculptures, paintings, and items used in their religious practice as members and leaders of their Baptist congregations.

We start by introducing the Mayos as folk artists, aware that this term has had several contested meanings. Here we define folk art as artwork that embeds the aesthetic and sociological concerns of an artist's community. Introducing the role of the community, however, complicates the interpretation of folk art, for the simple reason that few of us belong to only one community. Rather, we live, work, and worship within a number of communities that intersect and bring varied, sometimes conflicting meanings to our lives. Walter Octavia Mayo (1878-1970), whom his family called "Walter O.," and his son, Walter Leroy Mayo, Sr. (1908-2000), known as "Bud," participated in a number of overlapping communities: rural, agricultural (and largely White) central Ohio; the African-American communities of Mount Vernon and Columbus, Ohio; and the church congregations to which they belonged. Consequently, the Mayos' art is layered with meaning, testimony to the notable diversity of their experiences and influences.

Walter O. and Bud Mayo used their artistic gifts-Walter O. as a woodcarver and Bud as a painter-to reveal a variety of narratives influential in their lives. One dominant narrative concerns their connection to the folkways, specifically the farming traditions, of their rural birthplace. This "story" is told through the depiction of the animals that provided sustenance to farming families. Also significant are themes of movement and transportation, which informed the men's lives in both a cultural and a literal sense. Their occupational activity included horse-drawn planting, harvesting, hauling, and involvement in the local trucking industry. But movement and transportation also are significant tropes in the African-American expressive arts, tied to the painful experiences of Black Americans in slavery and in later generations. From nineteenth-century spirituals such as "Steal Away" to imagery about the Great Migration created by many twentieth-century artists, movement on one's own terms has symbolized Black freedom claimed within a racially divided society. Other narratives in the work concern the artists' commitment to family and faith. Collectively, these themes find expression in a passion and talent for carving, drawing, and painting that shaped both men's lives. Bud's second wife, Jeannette Mayo, recalls Bud's memory of his father "always whittling," and she relates that if Bud didn't have his sketchbook in hand, he was sketching on a napkin or scrap paper.

Attention to detail and inspired craftsmanship typify the work of the Mayos. Walter O. was adopted and raised on a farm in Richwood, Ohio. Farm and draft animals, specific references to the rural economy, were his favorite subjects. He carved the animals' musculature, stance, and harnessing with remarkable authenticity, which viewers who work with such animals have noted. While beginning his craft in the 1920s, Walter O. gave greatest attention to his carving in the late 1940s to the 1960s, following his retirement from the E.A. Schlairet Trucking Company of Mount Vernon. George Blubaugh, the grandson of the company's founder, recalls that Walter O. eventually became so committed to his avocation that he could no longer make the time, as he had in the past, for small carpentry jobs for local residents. Walter O.'s dedication to carving and his painstaking commitment to detail are apparent in his grand-scale works, such as the sixteen-foot-long Twenty Mule Team (undated) and The Mayo Special (1952). Bud often painted the images his father carved, and his farm scenes likewise display careful observation of rural life and an affection for farm animals. Testifying to Bud's artistry and focus, his pastor, A. Wilson Wood, remembers that Bud would labor for hours over the smallest details of his four-by-six-foot Homecoming banners, designed and painted annually for the Bethany Baptist Church in Columbus, Ohio. Pastor Wood asserts that Bud strove to get everything "just right."

The art of father and son reflects a shared engagement with the commerce and technology of transportation. Walter O. worked as a teamer (also known as a teamster), that is, one who drives cattle and cargo over land. After moving to Mount Vernon in 1904, he was employed by G. R. Smith Hardware and the Cooper Iron Works before eventually joining the E. A. Schlairet Trucking Company as the first paid employee. Walter O.'s Twenty Mule Team and The Mayo Special commemorate his years as a teamer and convey his knowledge of draft animals and their working context, particularly the subtleties of harnessing and hitching. The Mayo Special features six draft horses, each posed in a unique stance. The individualized treatment of the horses' musculature and the use of leather, metal, and gold paint on the wood provide a remarkably accurate representation of the method of harnessing animals. Some forty-eight years after his own experience as a teamer, Walter O. drew on his memory to produce these scaled carvings, meaningful to participants in a rural economy who understand the once vital, now virtually obsolete, role of draft animals and wagons in transporting goods.

Twenty Mule Team and Walter O.'s Chief Pontiac (undated) bespeak rural concerns but also relate to an emerging commercial culture, mediated at midcentury through advertising, radio, television, and film. The "twenty-mule team" that carried the cleaning powder Borax through Death Valley, California, in the nineteenth century had been broadly disseminated in American popular culture of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s in the print and broadcast media. The familiar Chief Pontiac, the apparent source of Mayo's Chief Pontiac, served as a prominent logo for Pontiac dealerships, a popular make of automobile.

The Mayos' work reveals generational as well as personal differences in responding to the experience of race in America. Walter O., a man born less than a generation after the abolition of slavery, takes a subtle approach to depicting racial characteristics. This artistic reality may stem from his own position as a member of a minority group living in a region with an overwhelmingly White population. For economic and practical reasons, African Americans in central Ohio in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often adopted a strategy of accommodation-engaging with their White neighbors-in order to deflect racial prejudice. For example, they avoided living in Black-only neighborhoods, they attended mixed churches and were buried in mixed graveyards, and they attended school alongside their White neighbors. While not wholly successful, for many people of color, an accommodation of Whites proved a functional approach. Whether because of personal vision or for more socially inspired reasons, the racial identity of the human figures in Walter O.'s Twenty Mule Team and The Mayo Special is unclear. The teamers may be light-skinned African Americans, or possibly Caucasians with tanned and weathered skin, a consequence of outdoors labor. Bud Mayo, in contrast, more assertively marks race, arguably reflecting the influences of the Black Pride and Civil Rights movements. While Bud's representations of biblical figures appear to be White, following European artistic tradition, he celebrates Black identity in his sketches of popular African-American figures of the modern era: Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, Colin Powell, and Columbus television news anchor Angela Pace. Bud's approach to contemporary subject matter itself seems to comment on changes in art and society: If in the past the proper subjects of art were members of the dominant culture (as in biblical depictions showing White figures), in the more socially advanced present there is space and honor for Black people of achievement.

Like other African-American folk artists, most notably Elijah Peirce (1892-1984) of Columbus, Walter O. expressed his deep religious convictions through his carvings. Ark of the Covenant (undated), though relatively small in size, radiates a powerful presence. The dramatic upsweep of the heavily modeled angel wings is the most striking formal aspect of the piece. The solemn faces of the angels denote the sacredness of the Ark, which Moses was commanded to make in order to hold the two tablets of the law; a miniature hand-lettered scroll listing the Ten Commandments is placed within the Ark. This Old Testament story transcends the remote biblical past to resonate with contemporary Black American experience. Not only does it invoke a covenantal relationship between God and an oppressed people, but it also dramatizes the central role of the law-whether the Ten Commandments or the Voting Rights Act--as a means for establishing justice and dignity in society.

Similarly, Walter O.'s Jacob and the Angel (undated) features an Old Testament scene that operates at multiple levels of meaning--a testimony to spiritual conviction and an allegory of political activism. The artist depicts determination and strength in Jacob as he encounters an angel blocking his path as he attempts to ford a stream. Following a protracted wrestling confrontation, Jacob refuses to yield, until the angel blesses him, proclaiming him a prince who has power with God and man. African Americans of faith, as well as those engaged in political struggle, readily can appreciate such a story of personal vision and fortitude in the midst of great trials.

Distinguished from Walter O.'s figurative woodcarvings are his decorative furniture pieces made for the Mount Calvary Baptist Church in Mount Vernon, Ohio, where the artist served as deacon. These works are still in use today. The most artistically accomplished pieces in the church are the bible stand and the altar table on which it rests. Both utilitarian and spiritual in function, the bible stand has gently and carefully carved forms; some shapes recall the angel wings of the Ark of the Covenant. Mayo's altar is a focal point of the church interior, placed prominently at the head of the central aisle.

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