Mary Lovelace O'Neal in her Oakland, California studio in 2020. Photo: Aubrey Trinnaman/ Boesky Gallery.
The American painter Mary Lovelace O’Neal, who was active in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s before eventually winning acclaim for abstract works that defy categorization, died in Mérida, Mexico, on Sunday. She was 84. Her death was confirmed by her galleries, Jenkins Johnson and Marianne Boesky, on Wednesday.
In a career spanning more than 50 years, Lovelace O’Neal produced energetic, large-scale paintings whose subjects are blurred among layers of rolled and dripped paint. As a young artist living in New York in the 1960s, she forged a practice that was critiqued by both the Black Arts Movement and the city’s avant-garde. But she was determined to chart her own course, and her art would eventually enter the collections of museums across the United States.
Lovelace O’Neal married the playwright John O’Neal in 1965, and their home became a hub for Black intellectuals, some of whom argued that her work should be more explicit in its social politics.
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