He was born in Detroit and was immersed in artistic work from an early age. His father was a trained artist and educator from whom Loving copied drawings and watercolors, and his mother and grandmother were prolific quilters. In high school, he took art classes and painted sets for school plays. A few years after completing his BFA and MFA, he moved to New York in 1968. One year after arriving, he became the first Black artist to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Despite the commercial success that followed, including a number of commissions, he found himself troubled by the disconnect between his geometric approach to abstraction—largely inspired by Josef Albers’s exploration of the square—and the intense sociopolitical landscape that surrounded him.

In the 1970s, Loving took up an entirely new approach: he destroyed his square-based works and stitched the torn pieces of the canvases into new compositions that mimicked the quilts made by his mother and grandmother. He also experimented with collaged paper works mounted on metal supports, such that they become pictorial and sculptural in their presentation. Through his continued experimentation in the ensuing years, Loving continually returned to a number of themes and motifs, such as three-dimensionality, vivid colors, the spiral, and jazz. He passed away from lung cancer in 2005.

Loving received his BFA from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and MFA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He was a committed educator, teaching at City College of New York from 1988 until 1996. He was the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1970; 1974; 1984) and the Guggenheim (1986). The Studio Museum has presented his work in exhibitions including Al Loving "Eight Years" (1977); Al Loving: Departures (1986); and A Constellation (2015).