The painter, professor and activist Mary Lovelace O’Neal has died, age 84.
Lovelace O’Neal was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and grew up between Jackson and Pine Bluff, Arkansas. She was deeply influenced by her father, a choir director and professor of music at Tougaloo College, Jackson. As an undergraduate student at Howard University, Washington DC, she was active in the civil rights movement including as a co-founder of the Non-Violent Action Group. She then moved to New York with her then-husband John O’Neal and completed her MFA at Columbia University in 1969.
The artist was known for her monumental abstract works, often layered onto soot-black surfaces. She started developing the technique during her studies through her Lampblack series (1960s-70s) by covering white canvases with lampblack pigment, thinking both about flatness and minimalism as well as social critique by making her paintings ‘as black as they could be’. Lovelace O’Neal continued to develop her work through the 2000s, increasingly including colour and subject matters from the various places she lived such as in the Whales Fucking series (1970s–80s) inspired by whales off the coast of California, and the Panthers In My Father’s Palace series (1980s–90s) informed by her time in Morocco in 1984.
In 1985, Lovelace O’Neal became the first African American woman to receive tenure in the Department of Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught for nearly three decades. She became chair of the department in 1999 and retired in 2006. Towards the end of her life, Lovelace O’Neal lived between Oakland, California and Mérida, Mexico with her husband Patricio Moreno Toro.
