Painter Mary Lovelace O’Neal returns to SFMOMA after 45 years with solo exhibition

Alison Guh, curatorial associate of contemporary art at SFMOMA, said this solo exhibition is as much an historical corrective as it is a celebration of the new works considering the impact Lovelace O’Neal has had on the Bay Area’s fine arts over the past 50 years.

Lovelace O’Neal moved to San Francisco in the 1970s and later joined the faculty at University of California, Berkeley, where in 1985 she became the first African American professor awarded tenure in the Department of Art Practice. She was named chair of the department in 1999, and professor emerita in 2006. She now splits her time between Oakland and Mexico.

When Lovelace O’Neal was a graduate student at Columbia University she developed a style that is a signature to her oeuvre, making lampblack pigment — powdered soot created from burning oil — central to the form and content of her art. She describes the pigment as enabling her to address “surface flatness, black as a color, and blackness as an existential, racial experience” in the exhibition’s notes.

Curated by Eungie Joo, the museum’s head of contemporary art, “New Work: Mary Lovelace O’Neal” features six mixed-media paintings on canvases covered in black pigment. Acrylic, pastels, charcoal and masking tape are used in her compositions. Joo selected the paintings in conversation with Lovelace O’Neal with a consideration of visual and thematic cohesion.

Colors shout out of the blackness in a shock of saturation in each painting. Teal, red, periwinkle, pink and sandy whites mix and overlap to create a sense of motion. Lovelace O’Neal has likened painting with color to “dancing with the paint.” Her canvases are all 7 feet tall and encourage an active viewing experience.

Lovelace O’Neal blends abstraction and figuration. Amidst the colors, figures emerge and dissolve. There is an equine motif in five of the six paintings. In the painting “Francis,” the artist plays with making and breaking visual boundaries. A rearing horse figure bucks out of a trapezoidal outline. Blooms of periwinkle paint stop at the edge of a line drawn above the horse’s head. There is a splash of red on the left edge that bleeds over the side of the canvas.

In life, Lovelace O’Neal has been breaking barriers since her youth. As an undergraduate at Howard University in the 1960s, she was instrumental in the formation of the Non-Violent Action Group, modeled on the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee, that worked to advance civil rights. The group brought in Bayard Rustin and Sydney Poitier to give lectures, and Lovelace O’Neal met and befriended James Baldwin.

In her artwork, Lovelace O’Neal is able to combine both social history and art history. The painting “La Pieta” captures eras of art movements in one composition. On the right there is a still life of a bowl of fruit and a bottle. In the center and on the left, three figures are outlined in soft blue. One figure has its back turned away from the viewer, a compositional device known as rückenfigur, literally “back-figure.” Colors and patterns take the foreground in an evocation of abstract expressionism.

The three-paneled canvas is named after one of the most represented subjects in painting and sculpture: the Biblical scene of the Virgin Mary holding the dead body of her son. The subject is not explicitly rendered in the painting. But Lovelace O’Neal expresses through her painting contemporary perspectives on images weighted in history.