Alumna Mary Lovelace O'Neal ’69 Has First Solo exhibition in 25 Years, 'Chasing Down the Image'

For the first time in over twenty-five years, alumna Mary Lovelace O’Neal ’69 has a solo exhibition in New York. Hosted by the Mnuchin Gallery, Chasing Down the Image is a survey over five decades of the artist’s work, spanning the late 1960’s through the 2000’s. Since one show in New York’s French Embassy in 1993, O’Neal’s work has largely remained private.

The journey for O’Neal’s work to the Mnuchin was by way of the gallery’s partner Sukanya Rajaratnam, who first encountered O’Neal’s work at the Baltimore Museum of Art, which acquired one of her paintings this past spring. Rajaratnam told Artnet, “When I attended their recent unveiling of their permanent collection, brilliantly rehung with the deliberate and thoughtful inclusion of African American artists, I saw the painting but also met the artist for the first time.”

The Mnuchin Gallery is known for its multimillion-dollar exhibitions of 20th century titans, from Willem de Kooning to David Hammons. Giving a private show to Lovelace, then, speaks to the larger movement in the art world toward overlooked talent, particularly by women and African American artists. The celebration of O’Neal’s work is long overdue and well-deserved. Which isn’t to say O’Neal’s work has been hidden until now: her work is in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Baltimore Museum of Art.

ArtNet says, of O’Neal, “While earning her MFA at Columbia University in 1969, [O’Neal] developed what came to be known as her ‘Lampblack’ series, in which she applied layers of loose, powdered black pigment to large, unstretched canvases with a chalkboard eraser or her hands, and then punctured the surfaces with spare lines.”

O’Neal was born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1942 and grew up between Mississippi and Arkansas. As an undergraduate at Howard University, from which she earned a BFA in 1964, O’Neal became an active participant in the Civil Rights movement, joining in marches, protests, and voting drives across the country. O’Neal once held the position of Professor Emerita from the University of California at Berkeley, and she retired from the University in 2006.

Chasing Down the Image will close on March 14th.