New Work: Mary Lovelace O’Neal

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 movements.

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, chair of the department in 1999, and professor emerita in 2006. Lovelace O’Neal now splits her time between Oakland and Mérida, Mexico, where these works were made. 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.”