Mary Lovelace O'Neal

1942–2026

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"Painting is magic, and it is happening, and it is full of grace and redemption, and it has a life of its own.” — Mary Lovelace O’Neal, 2024, New Social Environment #1049, The Brooklyn Rail, with Jessica Holmes

It is with profound sadness that Jenkins Johnson Gallery announces the passing of artist, educator, and activist Mary Lovelace O’Neal in Mérida, Mexico on Sunday, May 10, 2026. Lovelace O’Neal was 84 and spent much of her time in her Yucatán studio in recent years. She is survived by her husband, the Chilean artist Patricio Moreno Toro. 

Lovelace O’Neal was an indomitable, fiercely determined, charismatic artist who, like many female painters of her generation, fought for acknowledgement in a field too long dominated by (white) males, her struggle exacerbated by gender and race. But she persisted, and ultimately triumphed, part of a pioneering cadre of women artists and women artists of color who high-vaulted once impregnable barriers. Lovelace O’Neal is now recognized as one of the great painters of her generation, navigating between pure abstraction and narrative figuration, succeeding her way. Rebelliously, uncompromisingly defying categorizations and imposing challenges of all kinds, she integrated deeply personal stories with broader issues of racial and social injustice, her instantly recognizable style operatic, idiomatic, riveting. 

In 1969, Lovelace O’Neal graduated as the only African American student from Columbia University’s MFA program. Discussing what she learned from her time there, in addition to art, in a 2021 interview with Suzanne Jackson for Bomb Magazine, she said, “You had to fight doubly hard to be seen; you had to fight those white boys that were making all the money and getting all the recognition, taking charge of all the theory, all of what could be argued about. And then you had these Black men who were also treating us like second- and third-class citizens. So, you really had to fight for every inch.”

She produced paintings steadily, with great ferocity, her energy seemingly inexhaustible. Flamboyantly, even controversially titled, she thought of them as belonging to distinct families: Whales Fucking, Panthers in My Father’s Palace, Race Woman, Adventures & Misadventures, Lost in the Medina, and Two Deserts, Three Winters. Each have their own unique aesthetic resolutions while still part of her painting family, highlighting her mastery of color, innovative use of materials, changes in scale from the moderate to the monumental, and her agile, rhythmic, explosive, gorgeous mark-making.

She traveled extensively, to North Africa, South America, and lived in Paris for a time. Whether comparing the landscapes of the Saharan and Atacama deserts, reveling in the textile patterns and architecture of Morocco, or dazzled by the glimmering lights of Paris, her imagination and sympathies were expanded and enriched by her explorations of other places and cultures. It was during these travels that she discovered her affinity for printmaking—etching, lithography, silkscreen, woodcuts, “all of it”—which she likened to painting in its directness and became as central to her practice.

A prodigious force in painting since the 1960s and later in printmaking, Lovelace O’Neal achieved late-career acclaim, including an invitation to participate in the 2024 Whitney Biennial. In the catalogue, her entry reads: “Such a dynamic, independent, sometimes slightly outrageous point of view has driven Lovelace O'Neal throughout her sixty-year career, which has unfolded alongside heated debates about what painting should or should not do and prescriptive views of Black artists and abstraction." 

In a much earlier comment in an essay for Lovelace O’Neal’s 2002 midcareer retrospective at the Mississippi Museum of Art, Lilly Wei observed, in a similar vein: "Mary Lovelace O'Neal has remained stubbornly devoted to her vision of an art of sensation and memory, still wholly enamored of color and paint, still subtly subversive. Her paintings stretch wide, as if to gather in and embrace viewer and world into their encompassing breadth...O'Neal believes in her right to seize and put to use whatever she wants and needs, to refuse what she does not, without apologies or revisionism, to convey her deeply felt, ecumenical sense of the world."   

To that, we might add her deep sense of joy. That stayed with her even when her days of dancing with her paintings were over. “I never feel limits,” she said.
 
Text by Lilly Wei. Wei is a New York-based art writer, independent curator, and journalist.

Addendum by Karen Jenkins-Johnson
 

“For 6 years, every phone call I ever had with Mary Lovelace O’Neal began with, “It’s Me, MLO.”

I had the privilege of working with the legendary Mary Lovelace O’Neal at a pivotal time in her career. MLO, as she fondly referred to herself with me and my team, became a daily presence in my life — her voice, her opinions, her laughter, her demands. Together with some of the most respected curators working today, we worked tirelessly on her legacy and her place in the art canon.

Mary was a child of the Jim Crow South. In the 1940s and 1950s, she traveled north in the summers from Jackson, Mississippi and Pine Bluff, Arkansas to visit family in Chicago and Gary, Indiana. Mary and other Black families were only permitted to visit museums on designated days. Years later, in 2022, Mary went with her friends and family to the Art Institute of Chicago to see her own painting, Running with Black Panthers and White Doves (from the Panthers in My Father’s Palace series), hanging in its collection. She called it one of the highlights of her life.

She painted to Black classical music — Thelonious Monk and Nina Simone above all. Two of her masterpieces bear their names: Thelonious Searching Those Familiar Keys and Toni’s Rose Petals. Nina Simone, whose music MLO adored, once visited her studio at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and spent hours with her paintings.

Her circle was extraordinary. Among the friends who are now ancestors: Robert Blackburn, Robert Colescott, Ed Clark, Jay DeFeo, Sam Gilliam, Jacob Lawrence, Arthur Monroe, Toni Morrison, Joe Overstreet, Raymond Saunders, and Amiri Baraka. Her close living friends include Barbara Chase-Riboud, Mildred Howard, Suzanne Jackson, Carrie Mae Weems, Howardena Pindell, and Sylvia Snowden.

In our years together, Mary’s work entered solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA), and major group shows including the 2024 Whitney Biennial: Even Better Than the Real Thing; Edges of Ailey at the Whitney Museum of American Art; and Paris Noir at the Centre Pompidou. Her paintings entered the collections of the de Young Museum, the Mellon Foundation, the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), and VMFA. Forthcoming were Revelations: Journey into Abstraction at NMAAHC (June 2026) and Hard Art at MoMA PS1 (November 2026). In her final years she received the Anonymous Was A Woman Award, the 2025 Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award, and was named a 2022 On The Edge Honoree by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Now Mary is reunited with Tillie, her beloved Dachshund; with her family; with her beloved mentor Dr. David C. Driskell; and with all the fellow artists she loved to drink, smoke, and debate with. I will miss those phone calls — the ones that always began with “It’s Me, MLO,” and always ended with “Ciao!” Ciao, Mary.”

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Images

1. Mary Lovelace O'Neal, Photo Credit Aubrey Trinnaman
2. Mary Lovelace O'Neal in her studio in the early 1970's
All images courtesy Jenkins Johnson Gallery and the artist. All images copyright the artist except where noted.

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