Mary Lovelace O'Neal

[1] O'Neal's art has been exhibited widely throughout North America and internationally, with group and solo shows in Italy, France, Chile, Senegal and Nigeria.

[3] During her childhood and adolescence O'Neal's father, Ariel Lovelace, was choir director and professor of music at Tougaloo College and the University of Arkansas.

[4] O'Neal attended Howard University in Washington, DC, from 1960 to 1964 and studied with David Driskell, Lois Mailou Jones and James A. Porter, receiving her B.F.A.

[6] O'Neal continued her fine arts education at Columbia University, studying with Aja Junger, Stephen Greene, Leon Golden and Andra Rat.

O'Neal curated an exhibition for the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago, Chile, "17 Artistas Latino y Afro Americanos en USA" in 1991.

In 2005, she was selected to represent Mississippi in the Committees Exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. O'Neal started teaching full-time at University of California, Berkeley in 1978.

[10] 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.

[11] Along with Toro, who introduced new mediums and experimented with O’Neal, they displayed their original works Troisieme Triennale Mondiale d’Estampes at the Musee d’Art Contemporaine de Chemalieres, France from 1994 to 1997.

The mini retrospective, Chasing Down the Image, reveals the ways in which O'Neal has 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, Joseph 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.