Mary Lovelace O’Neal: Requiem
29 October - 19 December 2026
Marianne Boesky Gallery
507 West 24th Street

The first posthumous exhibition of Mary Lovelace O'Neal (b. 1942, Jackson, MS; d. 2026, Mérida, Mexico), Boesky Gallery is honored to present Requiem, featuring a selection of Lovelace O'Neal's work from the 1980s and 1990s—the period in which the artist honed her rich, personal iconography. 

In addition to eight large-scale paintings, the exhibition will feature never-exhibited archival material sourced in recent months from her longtime home base (since the 1970s) of Oakland, California. Her other studio and home, from which she gained inspiration in her later years and in which she passed peacefully this May at the age of 84, was in Mérida, Mexico.

Requiem chronicles a transformative time in Lovelace O’Neal’s 65-year 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. An expressionistic impulse—first discovered in David Driskell’s class at Howard University in the early-1960s—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. “There is incubation, storage of images, reinvention of images,” Lovelace O’Neal once said. “I want to touch something in the viewer’s genetic memory.”

Place, too, had a profound impact on the development of Lovelace O’Neal’s visual language during this period. Throughout these years—while managing a tenure-track academic career at the University of California, Berkeley; serving as chair of the Department of Art Practice; maintaining a rigorous studio practice; and exhibiting extensively—Lovelace O’Neal traveled for lengthy periods in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and South America. She kept a journal along her travels, returning to the studio with memories of characters, tales, and sensations that would emerge on canvas. “For me,” Lovelace O’Neal wrote, “visiting other places is something that becomes synthesized in such a way that I’m not even aware that it has happened.” The veiled women Lovelace O’Neal encountered in North Africa, for instance, mingled in her memory with the Civil Rights leaders of her youth in the American South, leading to Race Women Series #7 (1992–1993).

The show will be on view alongside Michaela Yearwood-Dan: A Woman of Will at 509 West 24 Street. Though the two were based across the ocean from one another and never met, Mary Lovelace O'Neal vocally admired Michaela Yearwood-Dan's work from afar; said Marianne Boesky: "Mary followed Michaela's work and would regularly ask me about her. She thought the work was really strong and was tickled each time she saw it."

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More information is in the above-linked press release, and a preview of works on view is below. See the Dropbox folder linked above to download high-resolution image files. Artwork information is in each image’s file title. Image reuse must be exclusively in association with press coverage of the exhibition, with the credit line “copyright of the artist and courtesy of Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen”