Beer With a Painter: Mary Lovelace O’Neal

“I can mark” is a phrase Mary Lovelace O’Neal uses often. Rightly so: She has been leaving her mark since the late 1960s, both on painting and on the Civil Rights movement, particularly as a founding member of the student-led Nonviolent Action Group at Howard University, where she studied with luminary artists including David Driskell. She counted Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Fannie Lou Hamer among her mentors in the movement.

 

The artist splits her time between Oakland, California, and Mérida, Mexico, where she was staying when we spoke over the phone in December. We connected over the fact that I had recently visited Jackson, Mississippi, her birthplace. There, she tells me, she was treated as a third-class citizen by segregated institutions, including the zoo, library, and art museums — where Black people were only allowed to visit on select days of the month.

 

Lovelace O’Neal’s paintings are rife with big marks and energetic movement, acting as declarations of presence in spaces where she wasn’t welcome. In her early Lampblack series (late 1960s), she encased the fibers of her canvas with the titular powdered black pigment before moving across the entire surface with linear color. Her Whales Fucking series (1979–early ’80s), on the other hand, considers the water displacement made by the aquatic mammals. Other work homes in on the subtle ways women subvert rules and move through repressive societies. She balances abstraction and recognizable motifs, layering elements with emotional density: beauty and pain dancing together.