For more than six decades, Mary Lovelace O’Neill’s artistic practice has constantly changed and evolved. She said during a conversation at the Chicago Expo on Thursday with Jamila James, who was recently assigned to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. “I more or less understood the work as I went along, but now I love it. I love what it took, and it took everything I have to get it done. This is the work of my life.”
She added, “I’ve been put in this box of abstraction, and that’s not really where I live. I live in another kind of reality, so what just seems to be completely realistic to me because that’s how I see it.”
Related Articles
Lovelace O’Neal is a fountain of stories, and you’ll be the first to admit it: “I’m from the South so there’s a story for everything,” she said.
James began the conversation by discussing O’Neill Lovelace’s upbringing in the South. Lovelace O’Neill recalled that she and her friends, who had grown up in Jackson, Mississippi, had been “drinking from white tap and all kinds of mischief–really resistant because we were old enough to know this whole system needed resistance.”
She began making art through the coloring books her father would give his children on the long trains north as a way to “make us quiet” so that she and her two brothers would “be quiet until we crossed the Mason-Dixon line and at that point, you know, it all opened up,” she said, Many of you were too young to remember this, and the others of you probably have no idea what I’m talking about. “
Although her brothers weren’t accustomed to drawing and coloring, Lovelace O’Neill did, which she attributes in part to her dyslexia because “you have other ways of understanding and you have to take that information that is there and run it through special systems. It might take a little longer. Being able to work in this way was a very direct and direct communication with myself and with others.”
While studying for the BFA in the early 1960s at Howard University in Washington, DC, Thomas was involved in both artistic and activist circles, which she described as “a kind of double life”.
However, all along she has stuck to abstraction as her primary style of painting. “I decided I couldn’t do the kind of drawing that could be used as propaganda,” she said. “That was the work I did at the picket line. The only way I could handle that was to put myself on that line. My drawings had information, but it had to be obtained differently. I wasn’t drawing black women jumping off The bush with a gun.”
Her summer residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine in 1963 proved to be formative as there was “nothing to do but paint or participate in art history,” she said. “It was very painful because your breakthroughs were rare. You were sent there to see what you can do and what you have to do in your path. And that is hard work for a young man.”
One day I entered the sculpture barn because “I had just had it with painting. I couldn’t stand the smell anymore. I just wanted to be far away.” She said, “I just wanted to be away.” She witnessed the artist creating a sculpture by sticking paper towels dipped in a film (beeswax and black pigment) On rebar and coat hangers.I tried it out and got an honorable mention that year for carving it.
That experience stuck with her, and one day, as a student at Columbia University’s College of Fine Arts, she was wandering the now-defunct pearl-paint lanes of lower Manhattan when she saw a bag of black pigment spilling on the floor, “That’s a beautiful black pile,” She said. At first she just passed by, but she soon returned and packed her wagon full of dye, which would turn out to be lampblack, the main material for her breakthrough series of the 1960s.
Most of the black panels in the Lampblack series were a response to the criticism it was receiving at the time. “I was fighting with black poets because the work wasn’t black enough,” she said. “This is the black stuff that I’ve been rubbing into the cloth, so you can’t put it into any color blacker than that, so this conversation took care of.”
She continued, “I decided to show them the way abstraction has played out in African history and how it can be as African as anything else. They couldn’t really figure out how to counter that.”
James replied, “You’ve given another entry point to this concept of blackness. You were actually giving physical, symbolic, and conceptual blackness.”
In 1979, she became the first black woman to give a solo show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. (For those in town for the Chicago Expo, he painted it Running with black panthers and white doves, California. 1989-90, from the series “The Panthers at My Father’s Mansion,” currently on display at the Art Institute of Chicago.)
The ending of Lovelace O’Neal’s conversation was a really exciting experience. She spoke truth to power, as each comment was greeted with massive applause by a swift crowd.
Referring to the current generation of emerging and mid-career black artists, she said, “I hope to be influential — I feel like a proud parent. Your parents don’t always understand what you’re doing. My mother used to say, ‘I was a better artist before you went to art school.'” I Glad to see these guys. They’re smart and won’t be taken advantage of, they’re not in stables, they’re not enslaved and they should know that, because I know that.”
She followed this up by saying that she felt it was only appropriate to address the reality of this conversation taking place at a commercial art fair.
“I want to talk to galleries and galleries: Realize that artwork isn’t just a nice little phrase. That’s what this bullshit is about — it’s work. This is my life’s work, and I’m not going to let it sell. That’s what I do. That’s what I did in 80’s A year of my life, so don’t think I’m going to give it up because of a trend or anything like that. And there are no discounts. That’s what we all have to understand. I think four hundred and eighty years of discounts are enough. That’s where Mary Lovelace O’Neill came from.”
On a final note, Lovelace O’Neill concluded the conversation by saying, “I am so proud of all of you who have fought for these positions that you deserve. You own it. You go in there and say who you are and keep saying that so people understand that.”
[ad_2]
