Visual Artist Mary Lovelace O’Neal Receives 2025 Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award
$14,000 unrestricted cash award recognizes mature visual artists with a long history of creative practice.
New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) has announced visual artist Mary Lovelace O’Neal as the 2025 recipient of its Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award. The $14,000 award recognizes artistic excellence and provides resources to mature visual artists with a long history of creative practice.
Lovelace O’Neal, a dynamic force in American painting since the 1960s, lives and works in Oakland, CA, and Merida, Mexico. She is recognized for developing a visual language that is acutely personal and profoundly political, with works in the permanent collections of institutions including The Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA), de Young Museum, Baltimore Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture. In 2026, she will be celebrated with a solo exhibition at Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA). Lovelace O’Neal is represented by Marianne Boesky Gallery and Jenkins Johnson Gallery.
With the support of an anonymous donor, NYFA created this annual unrestricted cash award in 2015 to enable the recipients to pursue deeper investigations or new explorations that can inform or enrich their work. It was developed in memory of the artist Murray Reich, a New York-based painter who also had a highly-regarded career as a professor of art at Bard College. This year’s recipient was selected by Amy Hausmann, Executive Director of Maine Arts Commission; Sanford Wurmfeld, artist, emeritus chairman of the Department of Art at Hunter College; and John Yau, American poet and art critic.
“We’re thrilled to recognize Mary Lovelace O’Neal with the 2025 Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award,” said Michael Royce, CEO, New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). “She is the type of artist who is always challenging herself, whose brushstrokes speak volumes. Through this award, we are celebrating her illustrious career and offering support for her continued growth and evolution as an artist. We are grateful to the anonymous donor who has made this award possible,” he added.
Throughout her 60-year career, Lovelace O’Neal has produced a remarkable body of work—including paintings, prints, and drawings—that reconciles the intimate and the monumental, the minimalist and the expressionist, personal narrative and collective mythology.
Often working on a grand scale, Lovelace O’Neal is renowned for her keen sensitivity to color and unexpected use of materials. Her practice moves fluidly between figuration and abstraction: the suggestion of architecture and figures often lurk just beneath her vivid, painterly surfaces. The enigmatic, often inscrutable titles of her paintings hint opaquely at a narrative embedded within the work that is never fully revealed.
The formal vitality of Lovelace O’Neal’s practice is inextricable from its social, political, and historical urgency. Although she never worked in the narrative and figurative styles favored by many artists associated with the Black Arts Movement, Lovelace O’Neal’s practice nevertheless speaks to her experience as a Black woman and reflects her desire to express these experiences in visual language.
Recent exhibitions include: “Whitney Biennial 2024” and “Edges of Ailey,” The Whitney Museum of American; “Paris Noir,” Centre Pompidou; and a solo exhibition at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA). Lovelace O’Neal has a BFA degree from Howard University (1964), where she studied with influential Black artists and art historians David C. Driskell, Loïs Mailou Jones, and James A. Porter. She studied under Stephen Greene at Columbia University, where she received an MFA degree (1969). She is a Professor Emeritus at University of California, Berkeley (retired in 2006), and was the only African American to chair its Art Practice Department.
On receiving a Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award, Lovelace O’Neal said: “For the next hundred million thousand years I am planning the continuation of a professional lifetime of laughing and lying, of morphing and incubating, until and throughout the making, till its manifestation—which has been my way of freeing myself.” She also thanked two of her great supporters, Karen Jenkins-Johnson of Jenkins Johnson Gallery and Marianne Boesky of Marianne Boesky Gallery.
Born and raised in Coney Island and the south Bronx, Murray Reich (1932-2012) attended City College and received his M.F.A. degree in Painting from Boston University. Following his first solo show in New York at Max Hutchinson Gallery, Reich was awarded a Solomon R. Guggenheim Fellowship. Reich received other fellowships, including one from the National Endowment for the Arts. His work was exhibited in two Whitney Annuals and at the American Academy of Arts and Letters as well as in solo shows and group exhibitions.
Reich was Professor Emeritus of Painting at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where he taught for 25 years. He served on the faculty of the Graduate Program in Art at Hunter College, also in New York. He was the inaugural director of Tanglewood’s Summer Program in Art in Massachusetts, and also taught at Boston University. He lived and worked in New York City, Provincetown, and Mount Tremper in upstate New York.
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