Hazen Mayo, '15 on Giving a Voice to Underrepresented Artists

A trajectory adjustment from the sciences to fine arts led Hazen Mayo '15 to unexpected new places.

Place of Influence: Sutton, New York, NY Role: Account Executive

Exciting Moment: Shadowing Sutton team leads as they worked with artist Kehinde Wiley on his interview with CBS Sunday Morning's Anthony Mason for his monument installation at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. (The work in question is pictured toward bottom of article.)

Biggest MA Takeaway: A community where everyone feels unanimously loved and supported creates an environment of genuine, equal opportunity.

Advice to Current Students: It’s never too late to do anything! You might feel premature pressure to neatly define yourself when applying to colleges, but an openness to change and growth will help you cultivate a fuller picture of who you are.

Exploring a Different Path

International Space Station Research Project teammates Andrew Johnson '15 and Hazen Mayo '15 at NASA, waiting for the launch of their project, in 2015.

During her MA days, Hazen Mayo always thought of her work in STEM as her wheelhouse. So you might be surprised to discover that today she runs press campaigns for artists, architects, museums, and galleries through Sutton, a cultural communications company with offices in New York, London, and Hong Kong.

“If you’ve ever been to the Yale University Art Gallery...you’ll understand how its amazing resources made it pretty difficult not to be lured in by the arts,” she says, in reference to her directional adjustment. This, paired with a particularly captivating art history course and her own predisposition for the visual led Mayo to switch from a biology major to one in arts. And then she discovered the field of cultural communications.

“It suddenly felt like everything I was looking for, but never knew existed,” says Mayo. Diving even deeper into the PR world, Mayo realized she also had a unique opportunity to draw on another of her passions: Making space for underrepresented voices and experiences.

“Roughly 80% of the art in the permanent collections of major US institutions is created by white male artists, which—proportionally— represents only a sliver of the innumerable lived experiences defined by the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality.”

The daughter of a biracial marriage herself, Mayo sees representing artists from a broad range of backgrounds as an opportunity to tell untold stories and to shine a light on the unique aspects of the imago Dei represented by each individual. “When we integrate diverse voices into public spaces, validating their lives and their experiences, we're shifting old paradigms by acknowledging and normalizing marginalized communities”

How to Honor the Voices of Others

What is the single most important skill Mayo utilizes in her work?

“Good listening,” she says. “So much of my job is to listen to the artist and faithfully translate the message they're trying to communicate...especially when so many of the artists we work with come from realities that I have not personally lived.” It is by listening well, and trying to avoid making culture-bound assumptions, that Mayo strives to honor the voices of those she works with.

Mayo credits her ability to listen and communicate to four threads of her own life: Her family, her faith, her experience as a woman of color, and her school.

Minnehaha prepared me to claim a space like I belong. Knowing the value of your voice and presence is essential to communicating our commonalities and reframing our differences as strengths.

“I was raised by a family that lives out an appreciation of multiple cultures. Also, growing up as a racial and ethnic minority, I never took the idea and power of community for granted; I felt a great need to understand and connect with people from different backgrounds. Regarding my faith, connection to others is integral to valuing and supporting one another. In building my own communities, I’ve also learned the importance of telling my own particular story. Minnehaha prepared me to claim a space like I belong. Knowing the value of your voice and presence is essential to communicating our commonalities and reframing our differences as strengths.”

Rumors of War, the statue Kehinde Wiley created in response to the row of Confederate statues on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Va. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts commissioned this piece, and Hazen Mayo had the opportunity to shadow the Sutton team as they worked with Wiley on his CBS interview covering the installation. Photo Credit: Buynow05/Shutterstock.

She sees the opportunity to employ the gifts she’s been given in the service of giving a voice to underrepresented artists as a unique honor.

“Museums are supposed to represent the spectrum of human experience, and I’m proud to steward stories that ultimately make these spaces more democratic, communal, and faithful to the whole ‘image of God.’”