AUGUST 23, 2024 – AUGUST 23, 2025
By M.B. Mayfield
M.B. Mayfield was born April 26, 1923, in Ecru, Mississippi, to Vanderbilt Mayfield and Ella Tabitha Judon Mayfield. His Judon family owned what a published and historical account of Pontotoc County indicates was the largest tract of land belonging to an African American family in Pontotoc County.
The Judon family, Mayfield’s maternal grandfather, established churches and schools for Ecru’s African American community in the late 19th century Village of Ecru and later in the incorporated Town of Ecru (1904). Mayfield’s mother, Ella Tabitha, received a music education from Spelman College in Georgia. Mayfield’s grandfather, Adam Judon, was from Georgia.
The death of his father and later his mother’s second husband and the harsh reality of poverty during the Great Depression left the Mayfield family less fortunate. A self-taught artist until the age of twenty-six, M.B. Mayfield describes the day he met Professor Stuart Purser in the Summer of 1949 as the most significant day of his life.
Mayfield studied art as an unofficial student at the University of Mississippi while working as a janitor to observe classes in the art room during racial segregation. Art became the vocation he would resiliently pursue, and Mr. Mayfield continued on the singular path to establish himself in the art world, though he was still an outsider to it in many ways. He exhibited his art widely in the 1980s and 1990s, including a show hosted by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture during the Thirteenth Annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference and at Southside Gallery in Oxford in 1997.
Following his mother’s death, Mayfield moved to Memphis, Tennessee in 1969. There, he worked as a custodian and security guard at Brooks Memorial Art Gallery before returning home to Ecru in 1979. In Memphis, he gained notoriety and made many connections with other artists and established patrons of his art. M.B. Mayfield lived and painted in his home from 1979 until his death from a heart attack in 2005. According to Foundation records and estimations, Mayfield painted well over 200 works in his lifetime. Many were versions of the same painting, though each has unique qualities.
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