At 77, the Abstract Painter Mary Lovelace O’Neal Will Be the Latest Artist to Get the Rediscovery Treatment at Mnuchin Gallery

New York’s Mnuchin Gallery is known for staging major,
multimillion-dollar exhibitions of 20th century titans, from Willem
de Kooning to David Hammons. But now, it is planning an ambitious
solo exhibition of an artist who the gallery’s director hadn’t even
heard of until earlier this year. In February, Mnuchin will present
the first New York solo show of 77-year-old West Coast artist Mary
Lovelace O’Neal in 25 years.

Mnuchin director Sukanya Rajaratnam first encountered O’Neal’s
work at the Baltimore Museum of Art, which acquired one of her
paintings this past spring and has made a public effort to add
work by overlooked artists
to its holdings. “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,” Rajaratnam
said.

She quickly planned a visit to the artist’s studio in Oakland.
“I was unprepared for what I saw: decades of work spanning her
early Minimal works to the expressionist work that followed,” the
dealer said. “I was floored by their scale—a lot of them
seven-by-12 feet or larger—grit and ambition.”

The show, titled “Mary Lovelace O’Neal: Chasing Down The Image,”
will be O’Neal’s first solo show in New York since one at the
city’s French Embassy in 1993. Mnuchin will feature works from the
late 1960s through the 2000s.

The show comes at a time when the market remains hungry for
overlooked talent, particularly by women and African American
artists. Mnuchin recently held a celebrated exhibition of the work
of abstract painter Alma Thomas not long before one of her
paintings set a major new record at
auction, selling for $2.7 million last month.
But Rajaratnam maintains that there are many artists from the
’60s and ’70s who remain underexposed. O’Neal, for her part, was a
woman, black, and working on the West Coast—three major biases for
the mainstream art world.

O’Neal is known for monumental paintings that she layers with
unexpected materials “to explore both deeply personal narratives
and mythologies as well as broader themes of racism and social
justice,” according to a gallery statement. She 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.

While earning her MFA at Columbia University in 1969, she
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.

After graduation, she moved to California and established a
studio in Oakland. She became a professor at the University of
California at Berkeley in 1970 and was the first African American
person awarded tenure there in 1985. She later became chair of the
art department and has been professor emerita since
2006. O’Neal continued to make art during her decades of
teaching.

O’Neal’s 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. The
Artnet Price Database has a single auction result for the artist:
Running Freed More Slaves Than Lincoln Ever Did (1995),
which sold for $40,000 at the Swann auction house in April of this
year.

Why is this broader attention only happening now? “Perhaps being
on the West Coast, a tenured professor, and eventual chair of the
department of art at UC Berkeley had insulated her from the larger
art world,” Rajaratnam said. “She is singular among her peers but
still left out of the Soul of a Nation dialogue,” she
added, a reference to the wildly popular
traveling exhibition of work by African American artists from
the ’60s. “It is an oversight that needs to be corrected.”

“Mary Lovelace O’Neal: Chasing Down The Image” will run at
Mnuchin Gallery from February 6 through March 7, 2020.

The post At 77, the Abstract Painter Mary Lovelace O’Neal
Will Be the Latest Artist to Get the Rediscovery Treatment at
Mnuchin Gallery appeared first on artnet News.