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Louis De Mayo is a stylized painter of contemporary Indian figures in
acrylic, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1926 and living in Phoenix,
Arizona, since 1973. When a gallery owner suggested that De Mayo tell
people he is Indian to facilitate sales, De Mayo asked whether "if I wanted
to paint a horse, would I have to say I was part horse?" His friend,
Carl Gorman who is Navajo told him, "Louis, if people ask what tribe you're
from, tell them you're Awoppaho."
A first generation Italian-American, De Mayo was raised in the neighborhood
that produced Mario Lanza and Frankie Avalon. "If you spit," he
claims, "you would hit a singer." After serving in the Marines
during World War II, he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts under
the G.I. Bill, then was employed in a series of commercial art jobs. He
relocated to Phoenix as Art Director for Arizona Highways, a job he soon
quit to establish himself as a full-time artist.
"I really have only one regret about leaving Philadelphia, and that is
that I didn't leave it sooner. I choose Indians to paint because of their
dramatic quality and their manner of dress," he states. "I had a
strong emotional attraction to the Yaqui and their black garb. Maybe it's
because I grew up seeing women in black. My people are all dark
skinned. I don't want to make too much of a racial issue in my work, but
it certainly could stem from such roots. I look at life as if it were a
big slow-moving steamroller. It gives you a helluva lot of time to get out
of the way if you fall down, but if you just want to lie there, it is going to
roll right over you."
De Mayo was written up and featured on the cover of Southwest Art,
December, 1980.
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