A final show in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ 21st-Century Art Gallery is set to open Saturday, before the space is closed as part of the facility’s $261 million renovation.
“Blacker Than a Hundred Midnights Down in a Cypress Swamp” centers on the 1970s work of painter Mary Lovelace O’Neal. It was a period in her creative life that found the artist maturing stylistically, and dealing with criticism from academia and some of the era’s Black intelligentsia.
The show’s title is drawn from a work of the same name that VMFA acquired in 2024 and a direct reference to “The Creation,” a 1927 poem by James Weldon Johnson. It’s among a raft of literary, artworld and pop culture references Lovelace O’Neal would slyly insinuate into her work.
“She uses titles — or the lack of titles — to really get to the heart of certain ideas,” said Valerie Cassel Oliver, VMFA curator of modern and contemporary art. “She's using literary devices to sort of point a way into the work and point a way into the politics, and point a way into the narrative that she wants you to at least reference when looking at works of art.”
Lovelace O’Neal was born during 1945 in Mississippi and grew up primarily in the South — her father moving the family to take up various teaching positions at historically Black colleges and universities over time. She eventually enrolled at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where the artist developed her political worldview, in part through her relationship with Stokely Carmichael, who was involved in student organizing at the time and later would join the Black Panther Party.
Cassel Oliver said the painter began using the lampblack pigment — around which the VMFA show is organized — to investigate the social and political ideas around Blackness while still at Howard. By the end of the 1960s, Lovelace O’Neal had begun graduate studies at New York’s Columbia University, where that exploration continued.
Her work was solidly indebted to abstract expressionism, a style dominated by artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Despite exploring that established style, Lovelace O’Neal was challenged by a professor for her work being too gestural.
She was “living that duality of social concerns and racial justice and trying to be a painter,” the artist later said about that time in her life.
“She is being challenged, on one hand … (by) people saying, ‘Your work isn't Black enough,’ to her professor at Columbia University, who's saying her work is too loud,” Cassel Oliver said. “So, that is when she starts using the lampblack pigment to really address both head on.”
The lampblack paintings, layered and furtively energetic, were first presented at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1979. Cassel Oliver, who referred to the works’ “velvety texture,” said the VMFA show is the first time some of the pieces will have been displayed together since then.
“I decided to show them the way that abstraction had played into … the history in the diaspora, and how it could be as Afrocentric as anything,” Lovelace O’Neal said during a 2022 artist talk about working with the lampblack pigment. “So, that just kind of cooled them out. They couldn't really figure out how to counter that.”
VMFA is set to host an artist talk with Lovelace O’Neal on July 16; the show runs through Aug. 2.