Mary Lovelace O'Neal, Author of Uncategorizable Abstractions, Dies at 84

"“I don't categorize my work. I don't give it a new name,” she told in 2024. “I just hope that in the future people see and know that this was a life's work.”"

"“The black pigment paintings were as black as they could be,” she told the New York Times in 2020. “They can also be seen as my response to my friends in the Black Arts Movement,” among them Amiri Baraka, who criticized her for no"

"In 1963, the summer before she graduated with a BFA from Howard, she attended the prestigious Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, where she discovered the lampblack pigment that would be a trademark of her practice. In 1965, she married playwright John O'Neal, and the couple moved to New York, where she attended Columbia University and began using lampblack in earnest, applying the powder to unstretched canvas with a chalkboard eraser or her hands, and striating its velvety, matte surface with streaks of vividly hued acrylics, pastels, or oils."

"Encourage by her father, a choir director and college music professor, to pursue a career in the arts, she earned a BFA from Howard University, where she studied under artist David Driskell and was active in the civil rights movement, helping to found the school's Non-Violent Action Group and traveling with traveling to Mississippi with classmate Stokely Carmichael to support voter registration drives and labor protests."

Mary Lovelace O'Neal, an activist, educator, and artist, died on May 10 in Mérida, Mexico, at age eighty-four. Her career spanned six decades, and she was long regarded as an “artist’s artist” before gaining international acclaim in recent years. Her work drew on flatness, abstraction, Minimalism, and social critique, using lampblack pigment to build richly hued, matte, striated surfaces. She was born in Jackson, Mississippi, earned a BFA from Howard University, and helped found a Non-Violent Action Group while supporting civil rights efforts, including voter registration drives and labor protests. She discovered lampblack at Skowhegan in 1963 and later developed her signature technique in New York after marrying John O'Neal.

Read at Artforum