Image above: "Self portrait 2019", painting by Max Hayslette

Born in Rupert, West Virginia in 1929, passing away in December 2024, Max Hayslette was a 1951 graduate of the American Academy of Art in Chicago and also in the fall of that year studied briefly with Egon Weiner and Alexander Archipenko at the Art Institute of Chicago. Mr. Hayslette said this brief period changed the way he viewed art and his own perception of how he would eventually fit into a life of design and painting. This was when and where he began to appreciate the modernist way of looking at life and painting. At the end of 1951 Mr. Hayslette was granted an internship with Kenneth Olson, one of the original Chicago Seven, composed of leading artists and designers. This was a period when remnants of the Bauhaus movement listed Chicago as its home. Mr. Hayslette remained on the Olson staff for 10 years.

In early 1962 Hayslette relocated to Seattle, WA and was a principal at Berg, Hayslette, Dupar design firm. In 1973 Hayslette founded Olympus Graphics, Inc. and Olympus Atelier on Bainbridge Island, WA. He lived and worked on the Kitsap Peninsula in Washington state. Mr. Hayslette listed Alexander Archipenko and Man Ray as two artists he greatly admires and from whom he has learned much. The artist has studied great works of Asian masters in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Kyoto. He traveled Europe studying and painting and often painted in southern France and northern Italy as well as the Greek Islands and western Turkey. The artist has been greatly influenced by these travels.

Mr. Hayslette is represented in over 350 private, corporate and public collections, most notably the Max Hayslette Archives Collection at West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV; the Rockefeller Foundation; Stanford University; Shoenbaum Library at the University of Charleston; Easley Library at Bluefield College, Bluefield, VA; West Virginia State Museum of Art at Cultural Center, Charleston; North House Museum, Greenbrier Historical Society, Lewisburg, WV; The Jerry West Collection; Department of Fine Arts, Seattle University; Bainbridge Art Museum, Bainbridge Island, WA: Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington, WV; Galerie Jacquin d’ Art Paris, Paris, France; American Medical Association; Wells Fargo Bank; Bank of America; IBM; Ford Motor Company; The Smithsonian; and US Embassies around the world. An abridged list of his showings past and present include Artists of Chicago and Vicinity Annual Exhibitions, Art Institute of Chicago; Northwest Watercolor Society Annual Exhibitions, Seattle Art Museum; 2003 Biennale Internazionale Dell' Arte Contemporanea, Florence, Italy; Exhibition Momentum Midcontinental 1952, Art Institute of Chicago; Artists of the Mississippi Valley Annual Exhibitions, State Art Museum, Springfield, IL; Allied Artists of West Virginia Annual Exhibitions, Galleries of Morris Harvey College, Charleston, WV; Feragil Gallery, New York City; Findlay Gallery, Chicago; Bev’s Fine Art, Raleigh, NC; Cooper Gallery, Lewisburg, WV; Roby King Galleries, Bainbridge Island, WA; Christopher Clark Gallery, San Francisco; Hanson Gallery of Carmel, CA; Dick Kleinman Fine Arts, Cleveland; Nese Galleries of California; and Kevin Barry Fine Arts, Los Angeles and Las Vegas.