Mary Lovelace O'Neal facts for kids

Mary Lovelace O'Neal, born on February 10, 1942, is an American artist and teacher. She is known for her abstract art, which uses different materials like paint and prints. Her art often has a simple, minimalist style. She used to be a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and stopped teaching in 2006. Mary Lovelace O'Neal's artwork has been shown in many places around the world, including North America, Italy, France, Chile, Senegal, and Nigeria. Today, she lives and works in Oakland, California, and also has an art studio in Chile.

Early Life and Learning

Mary Lovelace was born in Jackson, Mississippi, on February 10, 1942. She says her father helped her love for art grow. Her father, Ariel Lovelace, was a music professor and choir director at Tougaloo College and the University of Arkansas when she was a child.

Mary Lovelace O'Neal went to Howard University in Washington, D.C., from 1960 to 1964. There, she studied art with famous artists like David Driskell and Lois Mailou Jones. She earned her first art degree (B.F.A.) in 1964. In the summer of 1963, she also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. While at Howard University, O'Neal became involved in the Civil Rights Movement. She learned a lot from important leaders like Stokely Carmichael and artist Jacob Lawrence. She also worked for a short time at the Free Southern Theater (FST) with her first husband, John O'Neal.

She continued her art studies at Columbia University in New York City. There, she became part of the Black Art Movement, which greatly influenced her artwork. She received her master's degree in fine arts (M.F.A.) from Columbia University in 1969.

Her Art Career

Forbidden Fruit (around 1990) at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2022

Mary Lovelace O'Neal's paintings have changed over her long career. They started with loose, flowing shapes and later became more precise patterns. She has won many awards and shown her art in many exhibitions both in the U.S. and other countries. In 1983, she was invited to be an artist at an international art festival in Asilah, Morocco. In 1991, she organized an art show called "17 Artistas Latino y Afro Americanos en USA" for the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago, Chile. Two years later, she received the Artist En France Award from the French government. In 2005, she was chosen to represent Mississippi in an exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.

O'Neal began teaching full-time at the University of California, Berkeley in 1978. In 1985, she became the first African American artist to earn a permanent teaching position in the art department. In 1999, she became the head of the Department of Art Practice until she retired in 2006. She also taught at other schools in the U.S., like the University of Texas at Austin and the San Francisco Art Institute. She taught internationally at Jorge Tadeo Lozano in Bogota, Colombia.

In 1984, O'Neal started making monotype prints with Robert Blackburn in New York City. She loved this process and explored many other printing methods. She made over 200 prints at Blackburn's studio over the years.

O'Neal's involvement in civil rights movements deeply influenced her art. She was inspired by Stokely Carmichael, who created the terms "Black Power" and "Black Panther" (meaning "Power to the People"). O'Neal's activism is linked to Carmichael. In an interview, she remembered how meeting other artists in Morocco inspired her famous 1984 series, Panthers in my Father’s Palace. This series likely honors her experience growing up in Mississippi. In the early 1990s, O'Neal also started collecting torn pieces of paper from printmaking studios. She used these discarded pieces to create new, experimental collage paintings. She worked with Patricio Moreno Toro, who helped her try new art materials. Together, they showed their original works at the Musee d’Art Contemporaine de Chemalieres, France, from 1994 to 1997.

The Lampblack Series

O'Neal created her Lampblack series of paintings while she was studying for her master's degree at Columbia University in the late 1960s and early 1970s. These large paintings were made using a deep black pigment rubbed onto raw, unstretched canvas with an eraser or her hands. The deep black color of the surface was meant to "absorb and silence the noise of ideas, make space active, and affect the viewer."

Art Shows and Exhibitions

In February 2020, the Mnuchin Gallery in New York held O'Neal's first solo art show there since 1993. This show, called Chasing Down the Image, looked at over five decades of her work, from the late 1960s to the 2000s. It showed how O'Neal used abstract art and different materials to express political ideas. She combined experimental black art styles with ideas from Minimalism. She discussed ideas with artists like Donald Judd and Sam Gilliam, while also talking with Amiri Baraka, who encouraged her to make art about the Black Power movement instead of abstract art. In the 1960s and 1970s, O'Neal's abstract art was different from what the Black Arts Movement and the Black Panthers often focused on, which was art that showed people to empower Black communities. O'Neal's work "insists on combining experiences and styles that were once thought to be separate."

In 2024, O'Neal's art was part of the 2024 Whitney Biennial exhibition, called "Even Better than the Real Thing." She showed three paintings: one from her Two Deserts, Three Winters series (1990s) and two from her newest work, The Mexico Works (2021–23). At the same time, she had a solo show of her paintings at Marianne Boesky. This show, titled HECHO EN MÉXICO—a mano (MADE IN MEXICO—by hand), included large paintings she made over the past three years in her studio in Mérida, Mexico.

Art in Public Collections

Mary Lovelace O'Neal's artwork can be found in many public art collections. These include:

• The Oakland Museum of California
• The National Gallery of Art
• The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art
• The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
• The Brooklyn Museum
• The Smithsonian Institutions
• The Baltimore Museum of Art
• The National Museum of Fine Arts, Santiago, Chile

Personal Life

Mary Lovelace O'Neal dated activist Stokely Carmichael when she was at Howard University in the 1960s. Her first husband was John O'Neal. In 1983, O'Neal met the Chilean painter Patricio Moreno Toro, and they later got married.