Leigh Hyams

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Leigh Hyams (1926-2013)

The Art
Biography

Leigh Hyams, aka Martha Mae Nickerson, Martha Bolling, and Martha Hyams (1926-2013), was an acclaimed painter and teacher whose career spanned more than half a century and several continents. Based in San Francisco from 1974 to 2000, she later made her home in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Hyams’ figurative paintings reflected the expressive vitality of the Bay Area Figurative Movement, echoing the painterly language of Richard Diebenkorn, while her abstractions revealed affinities with the lyrical sensibility of Georgia O’Keeffe and the spiritual abstraction of Mark Tobey.

In 1957, Art in America named Hyams one of the nation’s outstanding “New Talents,” alongside other emerging figures such as Joan Mitchell, David Park, and Morris Louis. A decade later, in 1966, she studied with Larry Rivers, Conrad Marca-Relli, and Philip Guston—serving as Guston’s class assistant at the Fine Arts Institute of New College in Florida.

Writing in 1996, the eminent art historian Peter Selz observed:
“Hyams has created landscape paintings that are unique fusions of acute observation and imaginative fantasy. Her paintings, visionary statements about nature’s creative and destructive forces, are contemporary realizations of the romantic tradition of the Sublime.”

Born April 22, 1926, in Papillion, Nebraska, Hyams was the daughter of Mae (Baxter) and Ralph Nickerson. She studied art at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, earning her B.F.A. at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and completed her M.F.A. at the Instituto Allende of the University of Guanajuato, Mexico. She pursued postgraduate work at New College Fine Arts Institute in Sarasota, Florida.

Over the years, her subjects ranged from European megaliths and Mayan temples to Brazilian rainforests, Yosemite waterfalls, and large-scale imaginary flowers. Her massive ink paintings of Pre-Columbian megaliths and cultural objects are like nothing we have ever seen before. They are grand and heroic. She painted dogs, cows, family portraits, and folk traditions of Mexico, translating her surroundings into fluid, intuitive forms. “I am driven,” she wrote, “by a passion for what frees us, what makes us aware of a deeper reality, and brings us closer to the universe around us—and the one inside ourselves.”

Hyams’ drawings, paintings, and artist’s books are represented in the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor Museum, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum of California Art, the Des Moines Art Center, the Joslyn Art Museum, the Palácio Imperial in Curitiba, Brazil, and the University of California, Irvine, as well as numerous private collections across the U.S., Europe, and Latin America. Her museum exhibitions included solo shows at the Paco Imperial Center for Contemporary Art in Rio de Janeiro and El Museo de la Ciudad de Santiago Querétaro in Querétaro, Mexico. She was represented by Meridian Gallery in San Francisco for many years.

A deeply beloved teacher, Hyams taught at San Francisco State University, San Jose State University, John F. Kennedy University, the California College of Arts and Crafts, and the University of California, Berkeley Extension. Her teaching extended far beyond academia: she led workshops in mental institutions, Athabaskan villages in Alaska, and international retreat centers such as Esalen Institute in Big Sur and La Serranía in Mallorca, Spain. For many years, she also led international art tours for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, inspiring generations of artists to see the world through a painter’s eyes.

Hyams published How Painting Holds Me on the Earth: Writings of a Maverick Painter and Teacher and produced the video Making Marks: On the Excitement and Importance of Making Art, both testaments to her lifelong advocacy for creativity as a spiritual practice.

Married first to her college sweetheart, Navy pilot Robert Bolling, with whom she had two sons, Jan and Kris, she lived on military bases in Hawaii, Alaska, Texas, and Rhode Island before divorcing him and moving to Mexico, where she lived for four years. She later married New York City artist Ralph Hyams, becoming stepmother to his two sons, Nicholas and Charles. They lived in an unheated loft above a flower shop in Chelsea before moving to Sarasota, Florida, where together they ran the education department at the Ringling Museum of Art and had a daughter, Gina. After her divorce, she changed her first name from Martha to Leigh and relocated to San Francisco with her young daughter, where she built her career as a painter and teacher from 1974-2000. During those decades she was exposed to the Bay Area Figurative paintings of Richard Diebenkorn, David Park and Joan Brown and the canvases she created echo their fascination with the blurred line between abstraction and figuration. These are thrilling paintings.

Hyams’ paintings stand as luminous meditations on the natural and spiritual worlds. Her expressive brushwork, bold use of color, and sensitive observation unite in images that are at once intimate and expansive. Drawing from the traditions of Romanticism, Abstract Expressionism and the Sublime, she sought to reveal not just what she saw, but what she felt—the living pulse within landscape, animal, human and form. Through her deeply personal vision, Leigh Hyams created art that celebrates the mystery, vitality, and interconnectedness of all life.

We would like to thank Leigh’s daughter, Gina Hyams, son-in-law Dave Barrett and granddaughter Annalena Barrett for bringing Leigh’s work and story to us. Dave and Annalena literally hand-delivered all of the pieces from New Mexico all the way to San Francisco with great love and care.