Kurban, a Sweeter Day to Come

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. The works 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.” 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.”