Florida Art Shows- Florida Prize in Contemporary Art at Orlando Museum of Art

Reginald O’Neal’s work may look familiar if you have walked or driven past one of his murals in Florida. His paintings for this exhibition represent his history as well as the history of African descendants in America.

The museum’s information on the artist and his work-

Reginald O’Neal began his painting career as a muralist working on public art projects around his neighborhood. With an innate talent and help from a mentor, he soon transitioned from house paint on city walls to oil on canvas in his studio. In a few years he was exhibiting his work to acclaim and having it acquired by major South Florida museums and private collectors.

O’Neal’s paintings reflect his experiences growing up in Overtown, one of Miami’s oldest and most significant neighborhoods of African descendants. Once called the “Harlem of the South,” Overtown has a celebrated cultural history going back more than a century. During that time, it has also struggled to preserve its unique identity while residents have had to contend with pervasive poverty and systemic racism. Using combinations of vintage and contemporary photography, personal and community narratives, and his own insights, O’Neal has sought to portray in his work the value and beauty of life in the neighborhood. He sees his paintings as both windows through which outsiders can look and mirrors for residents to see themselves. “My goal as an artist is to continue doing what I’m doing now: expressing my truth, he says.

With boldly rendered forms, sharp contrasts of light and dark, and deep earthy tones, O’Neal’s paintings evoke such eighteenth and nineteenth-century masters as Goya, Manet and Sorolla. O’Neal’s paintings, though, are clearly contemporary, as evidenced by their photographic sources and subject matter. My Father, Lil Pat, and Our Ancestors (2021) is a monumental work that includes the artist’s father in the blue jumpsuit of a prison inmate, holding his young nephew during a visit. In the background is a black-and-white image from an archival photograph of black men and women in a cotton field. The painting connects O’Neal’s own family history to the centuries-old history of anti-black repression and racism in America.

O’Neal continues this theme in three other works: Pianist (2022), Singer (2022), and The Entertainer (2022). In each painting a single porcelain figure of a black performer is presented from a different angle. These once popular figures are today sometimes termed “black memorabilia,’ though historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. calls them “Sambo Art.” He notes that such objects have been produced since Jim Crow to popularize derisive stereotypes of Blacks.They are commercialized racism. In choosing to represent these loaded objects, O’Neal recognizes their emotional power and has made decisions about how to present them in the context of his painting. He has isolated each figure, showing the singer from the back and the entertainer lying down, while only the pianist obliquely faces the viewer. They are not shown as overtly salacious, but rather quietly set in a somber atmosphere. Possibly O’Neal is questioning with sympathy the plight of inclusivity or dehumanization these figures would have endured if real.