Mary Lovelace O'Neal

Mary Lovelace O’Neal (b. 1942, Jackson, MS) is known for her paintings that pair bold, monumental scale with layers of unexpected materials to explore deeply personal narratives and mythologies as well as broader themes of racism and social justice and contemporary critical debates. With roots in both Minimalist and Expressionist painting, her imagery has, over years and series, fluctuated between pure abstraction, narrative figuration, and the evocative spaces in between.

Attending Columbia University’s MFA program in 1969, Mary developed her Lampblack series; creating paintings in which she applied layers of loose, powdered black pigment to large, unstretched and stretched canvases. She would then use a chalkboard eraser or her hands to disperse thin white lines over the velvety dimensions of black paint; taking inspiration from Barnett Newman and his “zip lines.” These lines meant to divide and simultaneously unite the composition, as Mary abandoned her expressionist style to instead engage in a dialogue around flatness, utilizing the color field method of soak straining. Effacing the concept of the individual mark in favor of large flat, strained, and soaked areas of color, Lovelace O’Neal’s repeated use of black pigment acted as a response to her contemporaries within the Black Arts movement and their critique of the lack of narrative social activism within her work. She, however, describes the lampblack paintings as “as black as they could be,” alluding to their literal blackness and linking the abstraction to “give voice to the intangible elements of the human spirit.” 

Throughout her career, Mary Lovelace O’Neal has blazed a trail for Black female abstract painters, struggling for inclusion and re-defining a movement, insisting on an aesthetic integration of experiences once defined as exclusive to the white male painters. Originally from Jackson, Mississippi, Mary holds a BFA from Howard University, attended a residency at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and graduated as the only African American student in Columbia’s MFA program in 1969. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Baltimore Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and DeYoung Museum. Lovelace O’Neal recently had a solo exhibition at SFMoMA and wass a participant in the Whitney Biennial 2024, Even Better than the Real Thing. Lovelace O'Neal is now on view in Edges of Ailey at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, running from September 2024 to March 2025, curated by Adrienne Edwards, and forthcoming, will be in Paris Noir at The Centre Pompidou in Paris, France, curated by Alicia Knock, opening in March 2025. Mary Lovelace O’Neal continues to live and work, splitting her time between Oakland California and Merida, Mexico.