Artist and educator Mary Lovelace O’Neal’s work in civil-rights activism has deeply informed her practice since the 1960s. Working in painting, drawing, and printmaking, O’Neal developed an abstract language through which to investigate American racial politics. In the late 1960s, O’Neal began to use the material lampblack, a pigment composed of powdered black soot, which she applied to unstretched canvas using her hands or a chalkboard eraser. She would then interrupt the swaths of black with thin lines of white or color. O’Neal created artworks that achieved both flatness and tremendous depth, crafting an aesthetic through which to respond to both Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. The artist extended this practice into works on paper, such as Untitled 199 from around 1970. The drawing’s black expanse, which shows the artist’s application of materials in the upper sections, is interrupted in the lower quadrant by straight lines of white and yellow, as well as geometric and abstract shapes.
Born in Jackson, Mississippi, O’Neal became a Bay Area fixture, teaching in San Francisco and Oakland and joining the faculty of UC Berkeley’s Department of Art Practice in the late 1970s, where she was the first Black person to receive tenure and where she later served as department chair.