About

Natasha Mayers has been called Maine’s most committed activist-artist. She has supervised more than 500 murals as a touring artist with the Maine Arts Commission since 1975. The painted utility poles in her town which depict local history were featured in Lucy Lippard’s book, The Lure of the Local. She is artist-in-residence for Peace Action Maine, and was a National Endowment for the Arts Millennium Artist, creating community art in Portsmouth, Ohio, exploring local views of identity, values, and sense of place, to demonstrate how involvement in the arts can improve the quality of community life. In 2005 she received the Arthur Hall Award “for an artist whose work, community service and commitment to their craft inspires others around them to reach to their highest potential.”

Natasha was awarded the Individual Artist’s Fellowship from the Maine Arts Commission in 1998, the Artists Projects: New Forms Award from New England Foundation for the Arts, and the Zorach scholarship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1976.

She has taught students from nursery school to college and in diverse populations: immigrants, refugees, prisoners, the homeless, and the “psychiatrically labeled.” She organized “Warflowers: From Swords to Plowshares,” a 2005-06 traveling exhibit by 44 Maine artists, launching discussion about economic conversion of defense-oriented launching discussion about how to convert from a defense-based economy.

In her own painting, Mayers often explores themes of peace and social justice. In her State of War series, by placing images of war onto Maine’s landscape, she effectively asks, “How would we feel if it happened here? “An empathetic response,” says Mayers, “requires imagination.”

In the artist statement for her most recent show, Natasha writes:
“SIGNS OF THE TIMES” is a daily visual journal of intruding news images and events and feelings, my attempt to make sense (and nonsense) of the times in which we live. Individual painted signs and symbols are configured into larger asymmetric “signs” with compound meanings.In this body of work, I am using the abstract language of road signs combined with painted news images….. to make a playful and deadly serious statement that reflects recent world events. These invented and found images are drawn from Maine to Guantanamo, New Orleans to Iraq, France to Afghanistan.) It may be simultaneously seen as a cry of joy and a cry of rage, a damning critique of our government’s policies, but also an artist’s coping mechanism for living with the onslaught of news.

Her portrait was recently painted by Robert Shetterly as part of his Americans Who Tell the Truth series (www.americanswhotellthetruth.org), with these words of hers:

“We need artists to help explain what is happening in this country, to tell the truth and reveal the lies, to be willing to say the emperor has no clothes, to create moral indignation, to envision alternatives, to reinvent language. We need artists to help us come together and share our voices and build community around powerful issues concerning our roles in the world and our planet’s survival. Compassion must be translated into action.”