Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Whose Paintings Were Saturated in Black, Dies at 84

Mary Lovelace O’Neal, an artist and activist who made her name with monumental paintings, saturated with the soot-derived pigment lampblack, that explored not only blackness as a color but also Blackness as a metaphor and a lived experience, died on May 10 at her home in Mérida, the capital of the Mexican state of Yucatán. She was 84.

 

Her death was announced in a statement on her website, which did not provide a cause.

 

A Mississippi native, Ms. Lovelace O’Neal emerged as an artist during the height of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, at the nexus of Black culture and politics.

As an undergraduate at Howard University, she formed an activist group modeled on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, became friends with James Baldwin and dated Stokely Carmichael, the future Black Panthers firebrand.

Settling in New York City in the middle of the decade, she and her husband, the playwright and activist John O’Neal, mingled with the leaders of the Black Arts Movement.