Mary Lovelace O'Neal

Boesky Gallery is pleased to present Requiem, an exhibition of work by Mary Lovelace O’Neal (b. 1942, Jackson, MS; d. 2026, Mérida, Mexico) from the 1980s and 1990s—the period in which the artist honed her rich, personal iconography. Requiem is the first posthumous exhibition devoted to Lovelace O’Neal, who died in May at the age of 84. Lovelace O'Neal's work will also be featured in the forthcoming exhibition, Hard Art, opening November 5 at MoMA PS1.

Throughout her 65-year career, Lovelace O’Neal wrestled with the intimate and the monumental, the minimalist and the expressionist, the personal and the collective across paintings, prints, and drawings. Renowned for her keen sensitivity to color, Lovelace O’Neal moved fluidly between abstraction and figuration; human, animal, and architectural forms often lurk beneath vivid, painterly surfaces, while enigmatic, inscrutable titles hint opaquely at narratives never revealed.

Requiem chronicles a transformative time in Lovelace O’Neal’s career, both personally and artistically. Settling in the Bay Area at the tail end of the 1970s, Lovelace O’Neal established an illustrious academic career and embarked on an extensive agenda of international travel throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In California, the hint of submerged color that had appeared throughout the artist’s early, minimalist-inspired lampblack paintings burst forth from their erstwhile restraints. An expressionistic impulse—first discovered in David Driskell’s class at Howard University—reemerged in grand, physical gestures. As she wove childhood memories and visions of distant lands into her ongoing investigation of color and abstraction, the artist’s distinct visual language began to coalesce. A cast of imagined characters—“whales and mermaids, little pigs and butterflies, panthers and white doves”—percolating in the recesses of Lovelace O’Neal’s mind came to life on canvas, and a latent sense of narrative emerged across her oeuvre, as if each work embodied a scene from a grand mythology cultivated within the artist’s imagination.

Lovelace O’Neal’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond in 2026; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA in 2024; the Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS; and the Cité International des Arts, Paris in 1994. has previously been included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; the Brooklyn Museum, NY; the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; and the St. Louis Art Museum, MO, among others. Her work was featured in the Whitney Biennial in 2024. Lovelace O’Neal was presented the Artiste in France award from the French government in 1993; following the six-month residency, her work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Cité International des Arts in Paris, which traveled to the French Embassy in New York. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; the Smithsonian Institutions, Washington, D.C., the Brooklyn Museum, NY; the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; the Mott-Warsh Collection, Flint, MI; and the National Museum of Fine Arts, Santiago, Chile, among others. Lovelace O’Neal earned a BFA from Howard University in 1964 and an MFA from Columbia University in 1969. Beginning in the late 1970s, Lovelace O’Neal taught in the Department of Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley; she was awarded tenure in 1985, and later served as chair of the department. She retired from teaching in 2006, and later served as Professor Emeritus.