VMFA’s new exhibition explores the human spirit

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) celebrates a defining decade in the career of African American abstract painter Mary Lovelace O’Neal (born 1942) with the powerful new exhibition Mary Lovelace O’Neal: Blacker Than a Hundred Midnights Down in a Cypress Swamp. The exhibition will be on view at VMFA from April 18 through August 2, 2026. Admission is free.

“The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts presents art and exhibitions that foster important dialogues in our community,” said Director and CEO Alex Nyerges. “Visitors to Mary Lovelace O’Neal: Blacker Than a Hundred Midnights Down in a Cypress Swamp will be drawn in by the immersive artwork and inspired to consider their connection to humanity.”

Lovelace O’Neal’s work is rooted in her activism, which began while she was a student at Howard University, where she received her B.F.A. in 1964. Mentored at Howard by celebrated artist and art historian Dr. David Driskell, Lovelace O’Neal was a summer resident in 1963 at the Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting in Maine when she happened upon the lampblack pigment. The deep rich pigment — powdered soot from burning oil — came to symbolize biographical, social and political themes within the artist’s work.

 “Over the course of a decade, Mary Lovelace O’Neal explored the endless permutations of the lampblack pigment on canvas and paper to reflect the energy and ethos of Black culture,” said Valerie Cassel Oliver, VMFA’s Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and the organizer of the exhibition.

Beginning in 1969 as a graduate student at Columbia University, Lovelace O’Neal created her Lampblack series. The decade that followed not only cemented the future direction of the artist’s work but also set the tone for how abstraction by Black artists could push the genre of painting forward, while being socially engaged and politically charged.

 Lovelace O’Neal describes the lampblack paintings as “as black as they could be,” alluding to their literal blackness, as well as their ability to “give voice to the intangible elements of the human spirit.”

Among the works in the exhibition is a painting titled Blacker Than a Hundred Midnights Down in a Cypress Swamp, which VMFA acquired in 2024. The painting, and the exhibition’s title, were taken from “The Creation” (1920), a poem by James Weldon Johnson, who also wrote the Black National Anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”

The painting Blacker Than a Hundred Midnights Down in a Cypress Swamp will join eight additional large-scale lampblack paintings and 11 works on paper in the exhibition. These 20 works have not been seen together since 1979 when they were exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Mary Lovelace O’Neal will visit VMFA for an artist talk on July 16, 2026.