This painting was featured in Mary Lovelace O'Neal's 2024 solo exhibition with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, "New Work: Mary Lovelace O'Neal." The exhibition's text addressed her practice and legacy as such:

"Over her sixty-year practice, Mary Lovelace O’Neal has experimented with materials, color, and the discursive relationship between abstraction and figuration. Her paintings allude to a vast mythology of personal and shared narratives, from her beloved dachshund Tillie to her involvement in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Her early works from the 1960s utilized lampblack pigment — powdered soot created from burning oil, which she rubbed and pushed into her canvases — enabling her to address 'surface flatness, black as a color, and blackness as an existential, racial experience.' Lovelace O’Neal would then go in with materials including paint, gasoline, and glitter, introducing imagination and play to the velvety black expanses. In time, representational elements emerged from her abstractions, offering new narrative possibilities within a constellation of references across music, literature, and social movement. [...] Lovelace O’Neal’s recent paintings begin with a black ground, but color remains foundational to her practice. As she has explained, 'Painting with color was always a surprise. [It was] like dancing with the paint.' ."

Mary Lovelace O’Neal (born February 10, 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.

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. In 1979, she was hired at the University of California, Berkeley, where she became the first African American professor awarded tenure in the Department of Art Practice in 1985. She became chair of the department in 1999, and professor emerita in 2006.

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, DeYoung Museum, and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, among others. In 2024, Lovelace O’Neal had a solo exhibition at SFMoMA and was a participant in the Whitney Biennial 2024; she currently has work at Edges of Ailey at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, running from September 2024 to March 2025, curated by Adrienne Edwards. Opening in March 2025, Love O’Neal will also be featured in Paris Noir at The Centre Pompidou in Paris, France, curated by Alicia Knock, and in 2026, will have a solo museum exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Mary Lovelace O’Neal continues to live and work between Oakland, California and Merida, Mexico.