[MUSIC- Luscious Jackson]

Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar in for Alison Stewart, who's on medical leave. Artist and activist Mary Lovelace O'Neal has sustained a decades-long career in the art world. She's known for her big and bold lamp black paintings, prints, and drawings. Now she's got a new solo show of all new work in Chelsea coinciding with her inclusion in the 2024 Whitney Biennial. The show's called HECHO EN MÉXICO—a mano. That means made in Mexico by hand. The show features eight pieces created entirely in the last three years at her studio in Merida, Mexico.

All of them are huge. The largest on view is a 20-foot-wide painting. Some of them include colorful characters and gestures across black canvases. In each piece, she uses a unique visual vocabulary that's both personal and political. She draws on minimalism, abstract techniques, and expressionism to reflect themes like race and gender.

The show is on display at the Marianne Boesky Gallery, and it's going through Saturday, May 4th. Artist and activist, Mary Lovelace O'Neal joins us to discuss. Mary, welcome to All Of It.

Mary Lovelace O'Neal: Thanks very much. Happy to be with you.

Kousha Navidar: Happy to have you here. Also joining us is the founder of the eponymous Marianne Boesky Gallery. Marianne, welcome to All Of It as well.

Marianne Boesky: Thank you so much.

Kousha Navidar: Mary, you made all of these pieces between 2021 and 2023 inside your studio at Merida, Mexico. Where did you draw inspiration from for this new body of work?

Mary Lovelace O'Neal: I think inspiration is really not what it is. It's guilt; guilt that I've been given this beautiful, beautiful studio. It's pristine, it's virginal, and I haven't made a thing. The studio was a bribe from my husband to finally come and say that Mexico is more or less home. I'm from the Bay Area, from Oakland, you know the Warriors? Those traders. Anyway, I shouldn't say that.

When the studio was finished, I didn't ever see it, in fact, until it was open to me. It was full of the most incredible set of paints made also in Mexico. I won't say all I would like to say about the Mexican paints. I'll just say that Marianne brought what I needed from Pearl.

Marianne Boesky: [laughs]

Kousha Navidar: It was this lovely studio that your husband helped you discover, I'm guessing, as a way of saying Mexico is home. What themes or stories did you want to explore through the pieces that you made?

Mary Lovelace O'Neal: I don't think it really starts like that. I go in and I just sit in there. It was such a new place. It's not just having new canvas, like a blank canvas to start on. It's a whole new place. I don't really know where anything is. More than that, I don't have a bunch of things like my own things. In addition to these beautiful paints, I don't have any of my rags, and my little wrenches, and all of my tools. I'm sitting there. I don't smoke anymore, so I'm really just sitting there. I can't even sweep up butts of various kinds. I just have to sit there and be with that space.

Also, I am disabled to a great degree considering who I used to be. I'm 82 but not all 82s are as disabled as I am, especially painters. I have enough energy and enough ability to get up there and do what I have to do ultimately, and I'm grateful and entirely blessed. I'm sorry.

Marianne Boesky: [crosstalk] I'm sorry.

Kousha Navidar: Marianne, go ahead. What were you going to add?

Marianne Boesky: Mary, you're uniquely abled. You are not disabled.

Mary Lovelace O'Neal: Okay. I'm not. Tell that to my back.

[laughter]

Kousha Navidar: Mary, how do you start a new piece? What do you need in your studio to feel comfortable?

Mary Lovelace O'Neal: I think it's more the discomfort that gets you working because you have to make it your space and your stuff. I don't do things like building stretchers anymore. I still don't think very much of it, but as a young person, it was a good idea to have to build your own stretch bars. I don't do that and I haven't done it for many, many years since I found out how to bribe people and exchange people. I gave my lunches away at Howard for years because I just couldn't deal with it.

I'm just saying, I have help. I have real true studio assistants now who build the stretchers or they get the stretchers built and they just sew them as I want them, and then I'm still left with that blank space. This time it's been essentially black or charcoal like a charcoal board, the board that the teachers write on and they make you come up and write things to get even with you. You know what I'm talking about? Blackboards?

Kousha Navidar: Yes, blackboards.

Mary Lovelace O'Neal: Yes. I sit there and somehow I eventually, maybe it's two days, three days a week, a month, because I know ways to avoid it; bake a cake, go to a movie. Finally, you have to go in there. By that time, I've gotten enough courage to hit it. I may hit it with paint. I may hit it with pastels. I may hit it with charcoal. Then whatever it is going to be, evolves. Rarely do I start with exactly what I'm going after.

There is a series whose name I will not call and not discuss. I won't speak with you about it because I'm told that you can't use that very beautiful word. That very beautiful word brought those paintings into being. I was painting to the title. Okay.

Kousha Navidar: What I hear you say, I think it's interesting the way you started it was that it is in the discomfort that you find inspiration, kind of like necessity is the mother of invention a little bit, which makes total sense. Marianne, when did you first encounter Mary's work as an artist, and what did you find fascinating about her artwork?

Marianne Boesky: The first time I saw Mary's work was in 2019. She had a beautiful show at Mnuchin Gallery uptown. I really was not familiar with her work, which was shame on me and a little embarrassing. I was just blown away by the power of the paintings and the scale, the colors. That show was a bit of a survey, so it included works from several different series going back. It gave me bits of the power from each decade, almost. I couldn't get it out of my mind. I'd never really seen painting like that, especially by a woman.

Kousha Navidar: What do you think this new body of work does to add and call back to some of Mary's previous bodies of work?

Marianne Boesky: I'm excited because we are publishing a catalog that is the Mexico series, which will include the works in our show. One of the works at the Whitney and the solo show works that she has currently on view [unintelligible 00:09:06] in San Francisco. We commissioned [unintelligible 00:09:10] to write a text and she wrote an incredible text on late work and the power of late work in an artist's career.

I think that one of the things that this body of work is especially focusing on is grabbing at iconography and imagery that Mary has used all along. Each body of work seems tied to the location where she's working, and that's what inspires the palettes and the energy. I think that this body of work really is looking at her own history and pulling. Maybe it's even not in the forefront of her mind, what she's sourcing from her own past, but there's elements and imagery and almost symbolism in this work that brings together many decades of work.

Kousha Navidar: We're talking to Mary Lovelace O'Neal, who's a painter, and Marianne Boesky, who is a gallery owner about HECHO EN MÉXICO—a mano, means made in Mexico by hand. We're going to dive into the exhibit right after a quick break and talk more about some of those charcoals that you were mentioning, Mary. Well, this is All Of It. We'll be right back after this quick break.

[MUSIC- Luscious Jackson]

Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar, and we're talking about HECHO EN MÉXICO—a mano. It is an exhibit by Mary Lovelace O'Neal, the painter, and it's on display at the Marianne Boesky Gallery. We're talking with Mary Lovelace O'Neal and Marianne Boesky right now about the exhibit.

Mary, I want to dive into the exhibit a little bit. You've got paintings here that are extremely large. Some of them are four panels or canvases wide, like two facing each other in the main room. Tell me about the process for building these. Tell me about the size and how that plays into what you're trying to convey here.

Mary Lovelace O'Neal: I can't. I can't. I somehow put together a number five by seven pieces, and that's a part of that sitting around waiting for whatever is going to happen. Sometimes they are not that big. They grow sometimes, and sometimes I know exactly how much room I'm going to need, how far back I can get into a canvas, because for me, it's about being able to be inside of that space, to occupy it. How many chairs can I put in there? How many sunsets can go in there? It's all about that.

I give my imagination a run at it. At a certain point, I pull it back in and say, "Okay, I have to take complete charge of this because we have a show to do," or, "I'm becoming really too frustrated with this as it is. It's too much going on," so I start to edit. It's just process. It's the process of getting stuff out of that incubation in the back of your head, in the back of your brain, and giving it some concrete manifestation.

Kousha Navidar: Marianne, do you feel like you understand Mary's visual language? How did it go into deciding the spacing and the organization of the pieces in the exhibit?

Marianne Boesky: Well, I think that Mary, being one of the great artists, it's her prerogative to also make decisions and changes up until the very last minute. Because she's working with these 7x5 foot canvases, and they become diptychs, triptychs, quadrptychs, she plays around with them in the studio. There are times where we've even had photographs of a triptych that I'll check in with her a week or two later and it's now a diptych or part of a quadriptych.

When she finally, finally does decide what each work is, it's very much, I think, according to a deadline, because she has to. I think she, left to her own devices, would probably continue to play with these things because I think a lot of the pieces are puzzles that can fit together in multiple ways.

When she does finally decide, there's a lyricism to the work that I find striking, especially because there's so much of the black background that she allows a viewer to step inside the painting and finish the story or the narrative themselves because it ends before the seam of the next canvas, or it'll end with just darkness of the black background, which is also not a simple black background. There's a lot of nuance in what she's building with the paint in the painting.

When she finally came to the conclusion of this is the body of work of the Mexico Works, we also had to work a bit around the curator at SFMOMA who was building an incredible show from this body of work. She made her choices and there's some incredible paintings that I would've killed to have on view. Each one has its own power and voice.

Once I knew what SFMOMA was taking, Mary and I could get down to it and figure out what we should show as a unit. It was a lot of back-and-forth conversation. I went back to Marita and we sat together and tried to lay things out. Then in the end, we picked a group of paintings to send. Once they were sent, then it was, okay, now we have to figure out how to lay out the show.

I've been doing this for 28 years and I know my space quite well, the space we've had for six or seven years. We added it to our Chelsea space because it was next door. It's a beautiful space for painting. It was important to Mary that two of the 20-foot paintings were included. There are only two walls in the gallery that can handle 20-foot paintings. That became the anchor for the show. Then we just had to do a lot of moving around. I think we landed on a great layout and we've gotten a lot of great feedback from it because it gives each work a lot of airspace and a lot of room.

Kousha Navidar: I find it very interesting that you bring up the black pigment because that is a recurring theme in this work. When you look at the paintings, you see so much depth and like you said, nuance in the color black that Mary is using here. Marianne, I'm wondering for you as a viewer, how would you describe the texture of the specific black pigment Mary uses in her work? Break that down a little bit for us.

Marianne Boesky: Well, and Mary can actually do that better because it has evolved. When she first was making the lamp black paintings, which was in the early '70s, she was using a material that was almost like a powdery material that she was rubbing into the canvas. Now she's using paints- acrylic and oil paints. She's also using pastels and chalks. There's a mixture now that's different. There's a texture I think that's different. Mary, maybe you want to explain the difference and the reasons why you're not using the actual lamp black now, the way you were.

Mary Lovelace O'Neal: I am so fascinated by this conversation. I wish I weren't a part of it because you all are so coherent and Koushna-- Is that right? Is that how to pronounce your name?

Kousha Navidar: Oh, Kousha.

Mary Lovelace O'Neal: Kousha, okay. He's really clear about what he is trying to get at, and you lay it out to him. I just can't, or don't want to respond to the specifics of that. These are materials that I like. It's like paint. The colors I choose, those are things that I want to eat. I often say going to the paint shop is just this glorious experience because you bring home all of this stuff and you can't wait to do something with it.

The black came into my life in graduate school at Columbia and has remained, but it has taken on different substances because I could no longer use the lamp black pigment in great quantities because those pigments were making me sick because it's just like working in a coal mine. My clothing was rotting, and imagine what was going on with my lungs.

I also got tired of working on the floor. Pushing is such intense labor, even though I was happy to do it and to be crawling around on the canvas and pushing it. There came a time when I needed to have a different kind of contact with the making so that I could have this almost breathing counterpart. When there's canvas on the stretcher bar, it tends to breathe. As you push in, it pushes back. It breathes. It's on a wall.

There's enough space between you and the wall, but I'm not hitting that wall again and again with my hands and my brushes. A lot of it had to do with just needing to find some other ways to make. The black has taught me so much about what my space was about, how much room there was in there. Even though in subsequent work, things seem to change, but there's always that kind of black thing guiding me, the way to divide up the space. It's math in some way.

Kousha Navidar: Unfortunately, we have to leave it there just looking at the time, but what I would suggest to folks is to go to the Marianne Boesky Gallery and check it out because there are these stunning visual displays of black on these beautiful characters with lyrics deep into these paintings. You're talking, Mary, about its math. There is a lot of geometric beauty to what we're describing. We've been joined by Mary Lovelace O'Neal, who's a painter--

Mary Lovelace O'Neal: Can I say one thing before we close out [crosstalk]

Kousha Navidar: We've just got a close-out here.

Mary Lovelace O'Neal: -the Whitney that they should see. Also, there's [unintelligible 00:22:45] the Whitney.

Kousha Navidar: Thank you so much. It's the Whitney Biennial. That's right. We've also been joined by Marianne Boesky, who's the gallery owner. It's HECHO EN MÉXICO—a mano, and it's on display. Now. Thank you both so much for joining us.

Marianne Boesky: Thank you.

Mary Lovelace O'Neal: You're welcome.

Kousha Navidar: It's National Poetry Month, and we'll mark it with a conversation tomorrow about how to approach reading a poem whether you're new to the genre or want to deepen your craft. That's coming up on tomorrow's show. Thanks so much for listening.

 

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