Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing

Floor 5

Born 1942 in Jackson, MS
Lives in Oakland, CA, and Merida, Mexico

Mary Lovelace O’Neal began the series that included Blue Whale aka #12 (from the Whales Fucking series), after two whales caught her imagination as she walked on a beach near San Francisco. “And watching them, I thought, imagine the tons and tons of water they must displace when they’re fucking!” It is this sense of excitement and desire on a grand scale, the energy of the light in their spray, that she worked to capture in paint—more than the image of the whale itself.

Such a dynamic, independent, sometimes slightly outrageous point of view has driven Lovelace O’Neal throughout her sixty-year career, which has unfolded alongside heated debates about what painting should or should not do and prescriptive views of Black artists and abstraction. While Lovelace O’Neal was deeply involved with the civil rights movement on a political level, she resisted calls to make representational paintings that would illustrate or inspire the struggle, insisting that forging her own path in abstraction—as she does in each of the paintings on view here—was equally relevant to Black life.