Keith Mayerson has professionally exhibited his art in galleries and museums since 1993. His exhibitions are often installations of images that create larger narratives. Each work is imbued with allegorical content that relates to the world yet allows through its formal nuances for the transcendent and sublime. The works stand on their own for form and content, but like a prose poem of images on walls, experienced in context the images as a series, the viewer creates the ultimate meaning for the installations.
Keith Mayerson was a Semiotics and Studio Art Major at Brown University where he received his BA in 1988. In 1993, he earned his MFA from the University of California Irvine, and is now Professor of Art at the University of Southern California and Chair of Painting and Drawing. Keith Mayerson’s work is featured in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Columbus Museum of Art, The Davis Museum of Art of Wellesley College, MA, American University Museum, Washington, D.C., the RISD Museum and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. His graphic novel Horror Hospital Unplugged, a collaboration with the writer Dennis Cooper, is well known among graphic artists. A graphic novel biography of James Dean is forthcoming, to be published by Fantagraphics. Mayerson’s work was prominently featured in the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art with a solo show My American Dream, the Whitney Biennial, and the Whitney Museum’s inaugural show, America is Hard to See.