Mary Lovelace O’Neal: HECHO EN MÉXICO—a mano

A dynamic force in American painting since the 1960s, Mary Lovelace O’Neal (b. 1942; Jackson, MS) has developed a singular visual language that is acutely personal and profoundly political. Drawing on a broad range of influences—from Minimalism to Abstract Expressionism—Lovelace O’Neal’s practice is at once worldly, parsing social themes of race and gender, and philosophical, fully immersed in conceptual and metaphysical investigations of joy, exuberance, nature, and the sublime. The formal vitality of Lovelace O’Neal’s practice is inextricable from its social, political, and historical urgency, speaking to her experience as a Black woman and reflecting her desire to express these experiences in visual language.

Writer, editor, and critic Jessica Holmes’s writing features regularly in BOMB, Hyperallergic, and The Brooklyn Rail, where she also edits the ArTonic column. Other bylines include Vanity Fair Spain, The Magazine Antiques, and The Woman’s Art Journal. Recent exhibition catalogue contributions include Judith Braun: My Pleasure (Opalka Gallery, Russell Sage College), Ellsworth Ausby: Somewhere in Space, Paintings from the 1960s and 1970s (Eric Firestone Gallery) and Markus Linnenbrink: THEREARESPACESTHATBREATHE (Museum of New Art, Portsmouth). Previously she served as Editor-in-Chief of the arts publication Degree Critical. For nearly two decades, she worked for the Calder Foundation, including 6 years as its Deputy Director.