Valerie Cassel Oliver will present a talk, Mary Lovelace O’Neal:  Blacker Than a Hundred Midnights Down in a Cypress Swamp,  from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m., July 16, in the Cheek Theater at The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, supporting her exhibition that runs  through August 2. With a career spanning more than six decades, African Ameri can abstractionist painter, activist, educator and trailblazer O’Neal (1942–2026), is the focus of the VMFA exhibition organized by Oliver, the Sydney and Frances Lewis curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. She will explore the highlights of the exhibition’s large-scale paintings.

In the pivotal time that is the focus of this exhibition, O’Neal painted large-scale canvases and works on paper with lampblack, a deep, rich pigment made from powdered soot created by burning oil. This period not only cemented her direction in works from subsequent decades, but also set the tone for how abstraction by Black artists could push the genre of painting forward while being socially engaged and politically charged.

A native of Jackson, Mississippi, O’Neal earned a BFA in 1964 from Howard University, 

where she studied under David Driskell and Lois Mailou Jones. During her time in  Washington, D.C., she was active in the Civil Rights movement, working closely with Stokely  Carmichael and many other political and cultural icons. She was a member of Howard’s  student-led Nonviolent Action Group (NAG) and an active participant in sit-ins organized  by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

During an undergraduate residency in 1963 at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, in Maine, she discovered lampblack pigment and began to use it in earnest as a graduate student at Columbia University, where she earned an MFA in 1969. In New York City, she became part of the Black Arts Movement (BAM), engaging with writers and musicians whose works left an imprint upon her practice. After nearly five decades, she retired from the University of California at Berkeley, earning the title of professor emerita.