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, Mary’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. Mary however, describes the lampblack paintings as “as black as they could be,” alluding to their literal blackness and linking the abstraction as a way to “give voice to the intangible elements of the human spirit.” Her use of black pigment functions as an obvious symbolism for the unfiltered exploration of racial politics in the United States. Mary makes a further point of her intentions through the titles of her artworks, stating, “My paintings and their titles speak for me. They’re not attitudes of despair; they just simply state a factual existence that continues.” Her paintings, therefore, carry a sense of optimism despite their subject matter.

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 collections including The Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, DeYoung Museum, Baltimore Museum of Art, National Museum of Fine Arts, Santiago, Chile, and the Joyner/Giuffrida Collection. She is the 2022 recipient of the Mississippi Governor’s Arts Award Excellence in Visual Art, Lifetime Recognition Award by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and Anonymous was a Woman Award. Mary Lovelace O’Neal continues to live and work, splitting her time between Oakland California and Merida, Mexico.