Mary Lovelace O'Neal

Examining the essential and influential art of Mary Lovelace O’Neal, this survey of work spanning the last 30 years celebrates the legacy of a teacher, mentor, and heroine for many. As professor emerita of the University of California, Berkeley’s Art Studio Department—a first for an African American woman at the time—Lovelace O’Neal has become renowned as an important educator and painter of activist abstractions that have inspired countless artists in the San Francisco Bay Area, nationally, and globally. Constantly experimenting with form, color, and figuration to engage in cultural and artistic conversations on behalf of social justice, Lovelace O’Neal presents an oeuvre that continuously subverts the expectations imposed on Black artists, as well as defines the cultural power of minimalism and abstract expressionism.