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From NY Times profile March 2020: Ms. Lovelace O’Neal, raised in Jackson, Miss., joined in civil rights marches and became involved with the Black Arts Movement. She earned an M.F.A. at Columbia University, and went on to become a professor of art at the University of California at Berkeley in 1979 and later chair of the department of art practice there. She has been professor emerita since 2006. From Jan Avgikos review in ArtForum online: ". . . O’Neal moved to New York in 1968 with a BFA from Washington, DC’s Howard University, following a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine; additionally, she also had a track record as a civil rights activist. She graduated in 1969 as the only African American student in Columbia University’s MFA program and the next year moved to Oakland, California, where she has lived since. She blazed a trail with abstract paintings that were as informed by midcentury modernism as they were by experimental black aesthetics, in 1979 becoming the first African American artist to receive tenure in the art department at the University of California, Berkeley. Though black male artists of the time were systematically excluded from roll calls of importance, they ranked above women of color, whose struggles for inclusion were even greater. O’Neal’s dilemma was compounded by the polemics surrounding abstraction: She courageously refused the mandate of the Black Arts Movement and the Black Panthers to produce figurative work that would be accessible to her community and speak to its marginalization. Abstraction, deemed “white man’s art,” was definitely not part of that order. O’Neal saw it differently. . . . In the ’80s, O’Neal found her way to a highly energetic expressionistic style of abstraction in which sweeping gestures are choreographed alongside lyrical forms that appear to leap or fly through clouds of color, patterned passages of brushwork, and fields of mixed-media ornamentation. . . . " [She has made] art in the deserts of Chile, in Paris, and in North and West Africa. Her works reflect her activism, with titles including “Running With My Black Panthers and White Doves”; her love of music, “Thelonious Searching Those Familiar Keys”; and her appreciation of nature — the whale-mating series from the 1980s — which was the focus of an exhibition opening March 24 (2020) at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco.