Mary Lovelace O’Neal, the American painter who was active in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s before forging a career through abstract works that defied categorization, died in Mérida, Mexico, on May 10, aged 84. The news was confirmed by her galleries Jenkins Johnson and Marianne Boesky on May 13.
In a career spanning more than 50 years, Lovelace O’Neal produced energetic, large-scale paintings whose subjects (if you could pick them) blurred among layers of rolled and dripping paint.
As a young artist living in New York in the 1960s, she found her practice subjected to the critiques of both the Black Arts Movement and the city’s avant-garde. She had married the theater-maker and playwright John O’Neal, and their home became a hub for Black intellectuals who argued her work should be more explicit in its social politics. At the same time, as an MFA student at Columbia University, her gestural works were not impressing Stephen Greene, who had taught Frank Stella and saw a landscape dominated by Minimalists and Color Field painters. Though Lovelace O’Neal admired these artists—particularly Donald Judd, with whom she enjoyed arguing—she was determined to chart her own course.
The aha moment arrived in the aisle of a Lower Manhattan paint shop where she spied a mound of black pigment slowly pooling on the floor through a hole in a paper bag. She duly lugged four bags of lampblack powder back to her Columbia studio. Soon, she was mixing the black pigment in a bowl and applying it to unstretched, unprimed canvases before working back across the surface with lines of color. Her Lampblack series was born, one she believed answered both her artistic and political skeptics.
Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Black Glitter Nights (1970s). Artwork © Mary Lovelace O’Neal. Courtesy Mnuchin Gallery, New York
“[The Lampblack paintings] engage with the dialogues around flatness then exemplified by the soak-staining methods of the Color Field paintings,” Lovelace O’Neal told the New York Times in a 2020 interview. “The black pigment paintings were as black as they could be. They can also be seen as my response to my friends in the Black Arts Movement.”
Encasing the fibers of her canvases in black pigment would become a hallmark of Lovelace O’Neal’s paintings in the coming years, albeit in works spanning Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism, and more figurative efforts. After moving to the Bay Area in the 1970s, where she taught widely, she began a series called “Whales Fucking,” which was inspired by the sight of whales mating in the San Francisco aquarium and those she’d seen swimming in the bay while strolling on the beach.
Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Thelonius Searching Those Familiar Keys (1980s). (c) Mary Lovelace O’Neal. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging, courtesy of Mnuchin Gallery, New York.
With titles such as Toni’s Rose Petals (1981), Thelonious Searching Those Familiar Keys (ca. 1980), and It takes Three (1981–82), Lovelace O’Neal tried to capture not the whales themselves, but rather their energy and the water they displaced while moving (and canoodling) in the ocean. After decades of being something of a painter’s painter, it was these explosive works that would introduce Lovelace O’Neal to a wider audience in the 21st century. Works from the “Whales Fucking” series appeared in 2020 shows at Mnuchin Gallery in New York and the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. Blue Whale a.k.a. #12 (1983) was selected for the Whitney Biennial in 2024.
Born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1942, Lovelace O’Neal grew up largely in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where her father, Ariel Lovelace, was the chair of the Art Department at what is today the University of Arkansas. Instinctively supportive of his children’s artistic inclinations, he plied them with art supplies and encouraged her to take high school art classes. In 1960, she enrolled at Howard University, where she helped form a non-violent student group protesting racism and segregation in Washington D.C. She studied under the artist and advocate David Driskell, traveling across the U.S. to participate in marches, protests, and voting drives.
Mary Lovelace Running with Black Panthers and White Doves (mid-1980s/early 1990s) Artwork © Mary Lovelace O’Neal. Courtesy Mnuchin Gallery, New York
In the early 1950s, Driskell had received a scholarship to attend Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and years later encouraged his student to do likewise. In later interviews, Lovelace O’Neal would describe her summer in the northeast as a career catalyst, a time where she had the rare freedom to do nothing but paint. Skowhegan was also where she first encountered lampblack pigment through the demonstration of a visiting sculptor who worked alongside a brewing pot of the pigment. After the show-and-tell was over, she kept the leftover material for herself.
The inclination would gain form and substance a decade on in New York, one carried with her as she switched coasts. She taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, California College of the Arts, Humboldt State University, and the University of California, Berkeley, where, in 1985, she became the first Black woman granted tenure in its art department.
Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Won-by-a-Nose (2021 to 2023). Photo: Mary Lovelace O’Neal and courtesy of Marianne Boesky Gallery.
After retiring from teaching in 2006, Lovelace O’Neal spent much of her time in Mérida, Mexico, alongside her second husband Patricio Moreno Toro, a Chilean-American artist she met in Morocco in 1984.
Reflecting on her winding career and broad range of influences in 2021, Lovelace O’Neal detailed the long frustration of others attempting to categorize her art.
“My art comes from my observation of what’s around. The way I feel about abstraction and how I feel about me within abstraction at this point is really just so specifically mine,” she told the writer and curator Folasade Ologundudu for Artnet News. “It’s not like I have this overwhelming interest in Abstract Expressionism; it just happens to be how I work.”
