The painter Mary Lovelace O’Neal has returned to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for the first time in 45 years. The solo exhibition “New Work: Mary Lovelace O’Neal” opened Saturday and runs through Oct. 20.
The exhibition showcases new works made from 2021 through 2023 at her studio in Mérida, Mexico. The last time Lovelace O’Neal’s work was the subject of an exhibition at SFMOMA was in 1979, when her paintings were paired with works by the artist George C. Longfish. Her paintings have been included in group exhibitions since 1979.
Alison Guh, curatorial associate of contemporary art at SFMOMA, said this solo exhibition is as much an historical corrective as it is a celebration of the new works considering the impact Lovelace O’Neal has had on the Bay Area’s fine arts over the past 50 years.
Lovelace O’Neal moved to San Francisco in the 1970s and later joined the faculty at University of California, Berkeley, where in 1985 she became the first African American professor awarded tenure in the Department of Art Practice. She was named chair of the department in 1999, and professor emerita in 2006. She now splits her time between Oakland and Mexico.
When Lovelace O’Neal was a graduate student at Columbia University she developed a style that is a signature to her oeuvre, making lampblack pigment — powdered soot created from burning oil — central to the form and content of her art. She describes the pigment as enabling her to address “surface flatness, black as a color, and blackness as an existential, racial experience” in the exhibition’s notes.
Curated by Eungie Joo, the museum’s head of contemporary art, “New Work: Mary Lovelace O’Neal” features six mixed-media paintings on canvases covered in black pigment. Acrylic, pastels, charcoal and masking tape are used in her compositions. Joo selected the paintings in conversation with Lovelace O’Neal with a consideration of visual and thematic cohesion.
