About the Artist
Keith Mayerson (b. 1966, Cincinnati, Ohio) lives and works in Riverside, CA. He studied Semiotics and Studio Art at Brown University in the 1980s and received an MFA from University of California, Irvine. He is a tenured professor of art at the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California, where he has also created a visual narrative art program. Mayerson’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia; American University Museum of Art, Washington, DC; Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Massachusetts; UC Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, California; RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island; Fairfield University Museum, Connecticut; Rennie Museum, Vancouver; and the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami. His graphic novel Horror Hospital Unplugged, made with the writer Dennis Cooper, was published in 1996 by Juno Books. Mayerson is currently creating a graphic-novel biography of James Dean to be published by Fantagraphics, and was co-editor of the 2024 Frank Johnson: Secret Pioneer of American Comics Vol. 1, from the same publisher.
Past
March 22–May 31, 2026
Exhibition
Keith Mayerson:
My American Dream (Rocky Mountain High)
Hippies, rock bands, mountain warfare military units, and beloved comic strip characters converge in Keith Mayerson’s My American Dream (Rocky Mountain High). For over two decades, Mayerson (b. 1966, Cincinnati, OH) has turned his focus to the cultural heritage and folklore of the United States, scrutinizing the visual symbolism of Americana. The artist’s paintings immerse viewers in the media culture, political history, and pop icons that characterize his perception of the world. His decade-spanning project, titled My American Dream, is equal parts pop and personal, juxtaposing paintings of family photographs with those of both little-known histories and mainstream visual culture.
Aspen Art Museum will present the latest chapter of My American Dream, composed of all new paintings, focused on Aspen and its idiosyncratic identity and underground, avant-garde pasts. Mayerson’s Rocky Mountain High pays tribute to his childhood in 1970s suburban Denver and his impressions of Aspen and the mountain towns he visited as a teenager. For Mayerson, “the Aspen Idea of uniting mind, body, and spirit for individual and collective betterment also looms large” within the exhibition. Many works explore the utopian idealism that colored his upbringing, apparent in the crowd of long-haired youths in front of Aspen’s famed Jerome Hotel, modeled after a 1971 photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Elsewhere, country folk singer John Denver serenades the Muppets at the base of Aspen’s iconic Maroon Bells, the cover of John Denver and the Muppets’ 1983 album Rocky Mountain Holiday, photographs of late nineteenth-century silver miners at Smuggler Mine, and photographs the artist shot just last year from the tops of Aspen’s ski mountains. On another canvas, Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the gang ice-skate under a galactic canopy. Mayerson’s images narrate a celebratory, wistful time capsule of this pocket of the world. Mayerson ties this past to the present in paintings based on photographs shot last year from the tops of Aspen’s ski mountains. On these majestic vistas, the sublime unfolds both visually and spiritually. With the logic of a comic book artist, Mayerson maps a nonlinear narrative of Aspen and the greater Rockies across this transportive installation.
The accretion of Mayerson’s memories, both legible and unfamiliar, forms an antidote to a world inundated with images. These analog moments, long ago erased, still exude a feeling of the present rendered by Mayerson’s vivid, polychromatic brushstrokes. Each character fits into their own imaginary, forming an autobiographical yet spectral vision of Colorado’s Rocky Mountain High.
