Kurban, a Sweeter Day to Come (from the Panthers In My Father's Palace series), ca. 1989-90

Mixed media on canvas
© Mary Lovelace O’Neal. Photo by Ian Reeves.

Kurban, a Sweeter Day to Come belongs to a series of mixed-media paintings entitled Panthers in My Father’s Palace, created between 1984 and 1990, by Mary Lovelace O’Neal, who became professor of art at UC Berkeley in 1979, later chairing the department before her retirement in 2006. The Panthers are characteristic of O’Neal’s abstractions of the period, which combine bold, saturated colors and gestural forms with what the artist described as “shifting planes,” and allude to the artist’s long history of activism and involvement with the Black Arts Movement. The series was conceived in 1984 during a residency that O’Neal undertook as part of the Asilah Arts Festival, held in the eponymous port town on the northwest coast of Morocco. During her month there, the artist recalled a vivid childhood memory: attending rehearsals for an opera (Gian Carlo Menotti’s 1951 one-act Amahl and the Night Visitors) that her father staged at Arkansas State University, in Jonesboro, where he was a professor of music. “The whole thing was magic,” the artist remembered. “The mosaics and the quietness and shadows just opened my imagination.”