1944–

“I was not aware of the organization until I received an application for the competition from Caryl Steele,” said Pam Shelden Mayes, an abstract artist who was living in Jonesboro in the early 1990s. “She was representing the Arkansas Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Jonesboro, and she encouraged me to fill out the application.”

Mayes submitted three of her works — Tickle, Seasonal Encounter #1 and Penetration. They were all mixed paint on 36” x 36” paper. In describing these works, she wrote, “The forest surrounds with a sense of place. Dense. Close. Physical. The woods become a metaphor for a kind of internal space — they beckon visual songs emulating the internal forest. These paintings are like songs responding to experiences in the Arkansas woods.”

They were exhibited at the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock in the fall of 1991 along with the works of 19 other Arkansas women artists, and Mayes was selected by juror Grace Glueck of The New York Times as one of 10 artists to exhibit work at NMWA in Washington, D.C., in 1992.

“My memory isn’t very clear at this point, but I believe Caryl let me know the results of the competition,” said Mayes. “I was very happy to be included. I didn’t know what to expect, but I was interested in just going for the adventure. I do remember being invited to a coffee reception at the Governor’s Mansion hosted by Hillary Clinton after the winners were announced. I felt honored and grateful to be part of that experience.”

Mayes went to Washington for a reception honoring the Arkansas artists on April 9, 1992, and said, “I was awed by the number of people and impressed by the quality of work in the exhibit. Unexpected friends showed up to see my work, and it was a very interesting evening.

“The NMWA exhibit gave me some validation, positive self-esteem and support for the future of my work,” she said. “It was the most prestigious competition I had been in, and it was included on my CV. It also gave me the confidence to talk about my work.”

Mayes was born in Ottawa, Kan., graduated from Mount Marty College in Yankton, S.D., with a bachelor’s degree in 1969 and earned her master’s degree from West Texas State in Canyon in 1983.

She and her family left Arkansas in 2000 and moved to Amarillo, Texas, in 2005. She has been active in the art community there, exhibiting at local galleries.

“I moved several times after leaving Arkansas, and I sought out schools to teach art,” she said. “The NMWA exhibit proved to be a validation of my skills and education.”

Mayes says the subject of boundaries has unified the stylistic explorations of her art for over 50 years and that inside/outside, masculine/feminine define some of the contrasts that boundaries provide for her abstract visualizations.

In talking about career challenges, she said, “I knew I needed to make large work to be taken seriously as a woman artist. It was a huge challenge to design canvases to be smaller individual units that came together to a larger unified canvas. This was a logistical challenge due to transportation, and I needed to make the canvases fit in our Honda Civic to be moved from the studio to exhibits.”

Her three-panel piece Four Elements was included in a show titled Unearthed at Cerulean Gallery in Amarillo, Texas, in 2015.

Despite having macular degeneration, Mayes continues to make art today. “I have had to develop new ways of painting that are dominated by muscle memory,” she said. “My experiences with kinesthetic motion in making art have been helpful for me to understand how my arm and hand are painting without being able to see exact detail.”