The idea was born in an instant.
A curator attending an opening at the Baltimore Museum of Art was immediately captivated by a painting from an artist she had barely heard of, Mary Lovelace O’Neal.
Three months later, a five-decade retrospective opened at the Mnuchin Gallery in Manhattan, Ms. Lovelace O’Neal’s first solo show in New York since 1993, and a chronicle of a career that started with social activist art at the heart of the civil rights movement.
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The painting that caught the curator’s eye was“Running Freed More Slaves Than Lincoln Ever Did” (1995), part of the exhibition “Generations: A History of Black Abstract Art,” which opened last September.
“Her handling in that painting — the dripping and drawing alongside the expressionist strokes — struck me as so unapologetically bold that I wanted to meet her,” the curator, Sukanya Rajaratnam, recalls. “And lo and behold, she just appeared that evening in front of that painting, and we immediately hit it off.”
Ms. Rajaratnam traveled to Ms. Lovelace O’Neal’s studio in Oakland, Calif., where she scoured warehouses of artwork to assemble the show, “Chasing Down the Image,” which is on view at Mnuchin through March 14.
Ms. Lovelace O’Neal, raised in Jackson, Miss., joined in civil rights marches and became involved with the Black Arts Movement. She earned an M.F.A. at Columbia University, and went on to become a professor of art at the University of California at Berkeley in 1979 and later chair of the department of art practice there. She has been professor emerita since 2006.
Source: A Painter and Social Activist With an ‘Unruly Nature’
