page_title: Ealy Mays
section_title: Early years
hierarchical_section_title: Ealy Mays / Background / Early years
caption_attribution_description: English: Paris based Dayton, Ohio artist Ealy Mays's depiction of the decline of the industial midwest where he was raised up
context_page_description: Ealy Mays is a Paris-based African-American contemporary artist. His work has been exhibited in Mexico's Galeria Clave, Paris’ Carrousel du Louvre, Mexico's annual José Clemente Orozco Art competition, and New York's Guggenheim museum, to name a few. Legendary painter Henry O. Tanner was the first African American to exhibit at the Louvre in 1897. Mays’ 2005 “Migration of the Superheroes” exhibition at the Carrousel du Louvre makes him one of the few African-American artists to date to follow Tanner's footsteps to the Louvre.
  Mays counts Jacob Lawrence, Jackson Pollock, Maxfield Parrish, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, Rufino Tamayo, Herbert Gentry, Edward Clark, and Franz Kline as mentors. Residing in Paris for the last 15 years, he is a permanent recurring resident at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris, and an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.
context_section_description: The west Texas native, born in Wichita Falls Texas, to physician Dr. Dewey Mays  and his school teacher wife Mrs. Ruby Mays, was raised in Dayton, Ohio. The family moved to Dayton after the elder Mays graduated from Howard University's School of Medicine. Mays states that his parents chose to live in Dayton, because at the time in the mid 1960s, Dayton had a strong industrial base and was one of the best places to live and to raise a family in America. His 1998 painting, “Death of an American Boom Town (Dayton Ohio)” demurs the economic decline of the industrial mid-west and in particular, the demise in quality of life in his former hometown of Dayton, Ohio.
caption: Death of an American Boom Town
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