Mary Lovelace O’Neal (b. 1942; Jackson, MS) is featured in the upcoming Whitney Biennial—curated by Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli—opening March 20. The three paintings by Lovelace O’Neal included in the exhibition—one from her Whales Fucking series (1979 – early 1980s), one from her Two Deserts, Three Winters series (1990s), and one from her newest body of work, The Mexico Works (2021–23)—highlight the depth and breadth of Lovelace O’Neal’s oeuvre. The Whitney Biennial coincides with HECHO EN MÉXICO—a mano (MADE IN MEXICO—by hand), Lovelace O’Neal’s first solo exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery, opening March 15.

A dynamic force in American art since the 1960s, Lovelace O’Neal has developed a singular visual vocabulary that is at once acutely personal and profoundly political. Drawing on a broad range of influences—from Minimalism to Abstract Expressionism—Lovelace O’Neal parses worldly themes of race and gender while remaining fully immersed in conceptual and metaphysical investigations of joy, exuberance, nature, and the sublime.The artist’s body of work—which includes paintings, prints, and drawings—reconciles the intimate and the monumental, the minimalist and the expressionist, personal narrative and collective mythology. Often working on a grand scale, Lovelace O’Neal is renowned for her keen sensitivity to color and unexpected use of materials. Her practice moves fluidly between figuration and abstraction: the suggestion of figures and architecture often lurks just beneath vivid, painterly surfaces while enigmatic—often inscrutable—titles hint opaquely at narratives that are never revealed.

ABOUT MARY LOVELACE O’NEAL

Mary Lovelace O’Neal’s practice spans painting, drawing, and printmaking. As an undergraduate at Howard University, Lovelace O’Neal studied closely with David C. Driskell, Loïs Mailou Jones, and James A. Porter; as a graduate student at Columbia, she studied under painter Stephen Greene. In New York in the late 1960s, she was active with the Black Arts Movement, working alongside artists and writers Amiri Baraka, Emilio Cruz, and Joe Overstreet. In the early 1980s, she joined Robert Blackburn’s New York printmaking workshop and, in 1989, she joined Taller 99, a communal print workshop in Santiago, Chile organized by Nemesio Antúnez. In 1991, Lovelace O’Neal curated 17 Artistas Latino y Afro Americanos en USA, a group exhibition at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Santiago, Chile, featuring work by Driskell, Cruz, and Overstreet as well as Robert Colescott and Sylvia Snowden. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Lovelace O’Neal traveled extensively throughout Europe, Africa, and Latin America, often with her husband, Toro.

Lovelace O’Neal’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; the Cité International des Arts, Paris; and the Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS. Lovelace O’Neal was presented the Artiste in France award from the French government in 1993; following the six-month residency, her work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Cité International des Arts in Paris, which traveled to the French Embassy in New York. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; the Brooklyn Museum, NY; the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; and the St. Louis Art Museum, MO, among others. A monumental work from Lovelace O’Neal’s early Lampblack series was the subject of a 2022 Art Basel Unlimited presentation with Jenkins Johnson Gallery. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; the Smithsonian Institutions, Washington, D.C., the Brooklyn Museum, NY; the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; the Mott-Warsh Collection, Flint, MI; and the National Museum of Fine Arts, Santiago, Chile, among others. Lovelace O’Neal earned a BFA from Howard University in 1964 and an MFA from Columbia University in 1969. Beginning in the late 1970s, Lovelace O’Neal taught in the Department of Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley; she was awarded tenure in 1985, and later served as chair of the department. She retired from teaching in 2006 and has since been Professor Emeritus. Lovelace O’Neal lives and works in Oakland, CA, and Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico.

Text source: Marianne Boesky Gallery