Mary Lovelace O'Neal

Mary Lovelace O'Neal (February 10, 1942 – May 10, 2026) was an American visual artist and educator. Her work is focused on abstracted mixed-media (primarily in painting and printmaking) and minimalism. She was a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, where she retired from teaching in 2006. She lived in Oakland, California, and maintained a studio in Chile, and later in Mexico. She credited her father with nurturing her love of the arts. She spent most of her youth in Pine Bluff. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine during the summer of 1963.

She continued her fine arts education at Columbia University, studying with Aja Junger, Stephen Greene, Leon Golden, and Andra Rat. While at Columbia, O'Neal became involved in the Black Art Movement in New York City, which further influenced her work. and then appointed in 1999 as the Chair of the Department of Art Practice and in an interview with Bomb Magazine, O’Neal recalled how a chance encounter living in Morocco with other printmakers and creatives inspired her 1984 series Panthers in my Father’s Palace, a likely homage to her experience being a Mississippi native. Akin to O'Neal's experience with abstract layering, she began collecting torn sheets of paper from printmaking studios in the early 1990s, breathing new life into another man's trash- reconstructing waste into experimental collage paintings. Along with Toro, who introduced new mediums and experimented with O'Neal, they displayed their original works at the Triennale Mondiale d’Estampes held at the Musée d'Art Contemporaine de Chemalieres, France.

Lampblack series, 1960s–1970s O'Neal developed these paintings while earning her MFA at Columbia University. This series of monochromes, made in the late 1960s-early 70s, were monumental and made using ebony pigment that was rubbed into raw unstretched canvas using a chalkboard eraser or her hands.

Personal life and death O'Neal dated activist Stokely Carmichael, whom she met while attending Howard University in the 1960s. Her first husband was John O'Neal in 1965, and that marriage ended in divorce.

O'Neal died in Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico, on May 10, 2026, at the age of 84.

Exhibitions In February 2020, the Mnuchin Gallery held O'Neal's first solo exhibition in New York since 1993, which surveyed over five decades of her work, from the late 1960s through 2000s. The mini retrospective, Chasing Down the Image, revealed the ways in which O'Neal engaged abstraction and materiality exuberantly for political ends, marrying experimental black aesthetics with influences of Minimalism. She was engaged with issues taken up by Donald Judd, Frank Stella, and Sam Gilliam while simultaneously having conversations with Amiri Baraka who pushed her to make images of the Black Power movement instead of abstraction. During the 1960s and 70s O'Neal's abstraction went against the emphasis placed on figuration by the Black Arts Movement and the Black Panthers as a means for Black empowerment. According to a review by Jan Avgikos, O'Neal's work "insists on the aesthetic integration of experiences and styles once construed to be mutually exclusive".

In 2024, O'Neal was included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, "Even Better than the Real Thing". She shared three paintings—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). At the same time, she showcased a solo show of eerie, rhapsodic paintings at Marianne Boesky. Titled, HECHO EN MÉXICO—a mano (MADE IN MEXICO—by hand), the show included monumental canvases made over the past three years in the artist’s studio in Mérida, Mexico.

Her work was included in the 2024 exhibition Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA).

Public collections Her work is in various permanent art collections including the Oakland Museum of California, National Gallery of Art, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian Institutions, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the National Museum of Fine Arts, Santiago, Chile.