Mary Lovelace O’Neal, whose gestural abstractions consistently ran against the grain, defying the demands placed upon Black painters by critics and artists alike, died on Sunday in Mérida, Mexico. She was 84. Her galleries, Jenkins Johnson and Marianne Boesky, announced her passing on Wednesday.

Lovelace O’Neal produced sprawling paints defined by tangles of drippy, roiled strokes. This was a style that placed her outside the orthodoxy of Minimalism, the dominant movement when she was maturing as an artist during the 1960s. She also arrived too late to be classified as an Abstract Expressionist.