Mary Lovelace O'Neal

Mary Lovelace O’Neal (10 February 1942) 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.”  It Takes Three (To Do It) (From the Whales Fucking Series), painted circa 1981- 1982 is from Mary Lovelace O’Neal’s Whales Fucking Series, and was inspired by her time in the Bay Area and influenced by the Pacific Ocean. While teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute, Mary would often visit the beach with her students and draw inspiration from the mating whales off the coastline. Highly disciplined throughout the 70’s, Mary used this series to indulge in abstraction, drawing from what she learned while a student at Howard University and freeing her work from the confines of academic painting while gaining confidence in her own practice.  This series features expressive, abstract landscapes, with figurative elements where “persons and objects are jumbled together.” The Whales Fucking Series prominently displays abstracted curved and arched lines, suggesting the body of a whale as it breaches out of the ocean, gliding across lush backdrops of layered brushwork. O’Neal has explained, “Whales are associated with freedom and a tremendous intelligence we don’t understand.” Also drawing inspiration from D.H. Lawrence’s poem, “Whales Weep Not!”, with its rich imagery of the lives of whales, Mary composes her canvases via oil paint, glitter, and tape, conveying movement through dynamic brushwork and richness of color.

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 was a participant in the Whitney Biennial 2024, Even Better than the Real Thing. Lovelace O'Neal recently has had work 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 in 2025, was featured in Paris Noir at The Centre Pompidou in Paris, France, curated by Alicia Knock. Mary Lovelace O’Neal continues to live and work, splitting her time between Oakland California and Merida, Mexico. Forthcoming, Lovelace O'Neal will be subject of a solo exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, accompanied by a catalog.