page_title: Ealy Mays
section_title: The Mexican years
hierarchical_section_title: Ealy Mays / Background / The Mexican years
caption_attribution_description: English: Ealy Mays's tribute to the Mexican culture's respects for afterlife
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: While in Mexico, Ealy Mays met celebrated Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo who took notice of his work and became a mentor. According to Mays, Tamayo would be the inspiration for his signature watermelon paintings. Rufino Tamayo painted red watermelons (sandias)  and Ealy Mays perfected blue watermelons. Mays also became familiar with the works of legendary Mexican muralists José Clemente Orozco and Diego Riviera, whose art on extremely large surfaces and murals impressed him.  Both artists would come to have great influence on Mays' work. He often participated in the annual José Clemente Orozco Art competition. His other exhibits in Mexico included exhibitions at the Tercer Luger October Show in Guadalajara, the American Day Celebration in Guadalajara (Fiesta Americana) , the October Art Fair in Guadalajara, and at Mexico's Galeria Clava.
  Local familiarity with Mexican cultural history led to artworks which took on distinctive Mexican themes and characters and which paid tribute to the subtleties of the Mexican culture - from Lucha Libre and Mexico's love of free-wrestling to “Día de los Muertos” (Day of the Dead), which is a Mexican national holiday to celebrate, pray for, and to honor departed loved ones. Such artworks include Mays' "The Dead Dance", which conveyed the Mexican dead celebrating in skeletal forms. His “Last Train to Chihuahua”, which depicts a revolution-era train arriving at a station, received wide coverage in local newspapers, and “The Birth of The Mestizo”, combine many elements of pre-Hispanic Mexican Aztec culture's encounter with the Conquistadores, and the resulting post-Hispanic Mexico - where the eagle perched on cactus devoured the snake, which today, remains a part of the Coat of arms of Mexico
caption: The Dead Dance
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