James Hayward (artist)


James Hayward is a contemporary abstract painter who lives and works in Moorpark, California. Hayward's paintings are usually divided in two bodies of work: flat paintings and thick paintings. He works in series, some of which are ongoing, and include The Annunciations, The Stations of the Cross, the Red Maps, Fire Paintings, Smoke Paintings, Sacred and Profane and Nothing's Perfect series.

Education and teaching

Hayward got his Bachelor of Arts at San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, studied in the Graduate art program at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1966 to 1969 and got his Master of Fine Arts at the University of Washington, Seattle in 1972.
Taught:
Hayward has exhibited extensively, particularly in California, since his first show solo show in 1976. He has exhibited at historically significant galleries such as , and Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Los Angeles and Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, and his work has been included in museum exhibitions in institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Hirschorn Museum, Washington D.C., The Renaissance Society At The University Of Chicago, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, U.K. among others. Through the 1990s and 2000s he exhibited extensively at Modernism, San Francisco and Ace Contemporary Exhibitions in Los Angeles. Artist Mike Kelley curated a solo exhibition of his work in 2005 at the in New York calling Hayward "one of the few truly important West Coast Painters." Also in 2005, critic and educator Dave Hickey included his work in a curated show entitled Step into Liquid, at the Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles.
Recently Hayward's work has been included in at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, curated by Paul Schimmel in 2011, a solo exhibition at Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles James Hayward Paintings from the 70's in conjunction with the Getty's Pacific Standard Time exhibition in 2011 and his Annunciation paintings have been shown in the solo exhibition Variations on the Annunciation at Meliksetian | Briggs in Los Angeles in 2013.

Works in institutional and museum collections

In 2010, Hayward produced a book of short stories entitled Indiscretion: Selected Stories, based on his reminiscences, "war stories" as his close friend artist Ed Moses calls them. Writing in The Huffington Post, Gordy Grundy calls it "a chronicle of a ribald life in the arts as well as a glimpse of SoCal living".