Margaret Kilgallen and Barry McGee

Margaret Margaret Kilgallen was born in 1967 in Washington, DC, and received her BA in printmaking from Colorado College in 1989. Early experiences as a librarian and bookbinder contributed to her encyclopedic knowledge of signs, drawn from American folk tradition, printmaking, and letterpress. Kilgallen had a love of “things that show the evidence of the human hand.” Painting directly on the wall, Kilgallen created room-size murals that recall a time when personal craft and handmade signs were the dominant aesthetic. Strong, independent women—walking, surfing, fighting, and biking—are featured prominently in the artist’s compositions. Her work has been shown at Deitch Projects and the Drawing Room in New York, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the Luggage Store in San Francisco, Forum for Contemporary Art in St. Louis, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Kilgallen’s work was presented at UCLA Hammer Museum. She died in June 2001 in San Francisco, where she lived with her husband, Barry McGee. (source:http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/margaret-kilgallen) You can read more about her here.

Barry McGee is a lauded and much-respected cult figure in a bi-coastal subculture that comprises skaters, graffiti artists, and West Coast surfers, Barry McGee was born in 1966 in California, where he continues to live and work. In 1991, he received a BFA in painting and printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute. His drawings, paintings, and mixed-media installations take their inspiration from contemporary urban culture, incorporating elements such as empty liquor bottles and spray-paint cans, tagged signs, wrenches, and scrap wood or metal. McGee is also a graffiti artist, working on the streets of America’s cities since the 1980s, where he is known by the tag name “Twist.” He views graffiti as a vital method of communication, one that keeps him in touch with a larger, more diverse audience than can be reached through the traditional spaces of a gallery or museum. His trademark icon, a male caricature with sagging eyes and a bemused expression, recalls the homeless people and transients who call the streets their home. McGee says, “Compelling art, to me, is a name carved into a tree.” His work has been shown at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and on streets and trains all over the United States. He and his daughter, Asha, live in San Francisco. He recently had a mid-career retrospective. (source http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/barry-mcgee   

Margaret Kilgallen: In the Sweet Bye and Bye

Just received a copy of Margaret Kilgallen: In the Sweet Bye and Bye and feel like I opened a small treasure. It is a remarkable survey of her work and includes essays and an interview with her by Susan Sollins.  She is described as an "intuitionist with a knowing hand"...I found Margaret Kilgallen through Lisa Congdon and the ecourse I am taking.

"Margaret Kilgallen was a force." is how the book starts.  She lived in San Francisco Bay Area for over a decade. In 1989 she graduated from Colorado College with a BFA in Studio Art and Printmaking  and in 2001 received her MFA from Standford University.

Margaret Leisha Kilgallen (October 28, 1967 – June 26, 2001) was a San Francisco Bay Area artist. Though a contemporary artist, her work showed a strong influence from folk art. She was considered a central figure in the Bay Area Mission School art movement. (wiki)

"Kilgallen consciously employed a figurative style that would be accessible to the public....According to the artist, her repetoire of symbols, typefaces, words, and icons, made up a wardrobe, their juxtaposition simply her choosing, her fancy. Among these fragments, Kilgallen celebrates the common and very remarkable lives of everyday people."

Kilgallen also had a high regard for old time music, hobo graffiti, and California as a "place". She emerged as part of a group of artists in San Francisco including Barry McGee, Chris Johanson, and Alicia McCarthy, who all "shared a heartfelt, handmade, and observational approach to art-making." Alex Baker, curator of Contemporary Art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts states, "In the end, Kilgallen's work is best understood within a context that predates the advent of youth-savvy marketing.  Her art is a reclamation and celebration of Marcus's "old, weird, America" that survived and continues to thrive on the margins of the mainstream."

Kilgallen died in 2001, at age 33, from complications of breast cancer three weeks after the birth of Asha, her daughter with her husband and collaborator Barry McGee. Kilgallen has since been the subject of several posthumous retrospectives. (Wiki)

Here is a short video excerpt from PBS's Art in the Twent-First Century on her. And here is the trailer for part of Beautiful Losers, that features Barry McGee (aka Twist), Margaret's husband. Near the end is their little girl, Asha painting with her father. I am hoping to get to the Mission District during our time in San Francisco to try to find some murals....

Mural, LACMA parking garage (now torn down) by Margaret Kilgallen