Margaret Kilgallen
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Margaret Kilgallen (1967-2001) was an influential San Francisco Bay Area artist whose paintings and murals reflected a variety of influences including the dying art of hand-painted signs, elements of American folk art, mural painting, and a variety of formal painting strategies. Her many works in gouache and acrylic on found paper--often discarded book endpapers--reflect a history of typographic styles and symbology that can be traced to her work as a book conservator with Dan Flanagan at The San Francisco Public Library in the early to mid 1990s.
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[edit] Influences
Kilgallen was an avid reader and thinker, looking to Appalachian music, signage, letterpress printing, hobo train writing and religious and decorative arts to inform her work. Her work demonstrates her respect for and engagement with craftsmanship and the stories of everyday peoples lives. She was especially interested in "the evidence of the maker’s hand."
As she explained: "I like things that are handmade and I like to see people's hand in the world, anywhere in the world; it doesn't matter to me where it is. And in my own work, I do everything by hand. I don't project or use anything mechanical, because even though I do spend a lot of time trying to perfect my line work and my hand, my hand will always be imperfect because it's human. And I think it's the part that's off that's interesting, that even if I'm doing really big letters and I spend a lot of time going over the line and over the line and trying to make it straight, I'll never be able to make it straight. From a distance it might look straight, but when you get close up, you can always see the line waver. And I think that's where the beauty is." [1]
[edit] Life and career
Kilgallen was born in 1967 in Washington, D.C. and grew up nearby in the suburb of Kensington, Maryland She received a BA in printmaking from Colorado College in 1989 and an MFA from Stanford University in 2001. Kilgallen’s work has been exhibited at the Luggage Store Gallery, San Francisco; Drawing Center, New York; Gallery 16, San Francisco; Forum for Contemporary Art, St. Louis; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.
She died of complications from breast cancer on June 26, 2001, in San Francisco. A survey of her work was shown at the Gallery at REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) from June to August 2005. (Picture)
[edit] Relationship to other artists
Kilgallen had close ties with filmmaker Bill Daniel, musician Tommy Guerrero, and artists Thomas Campbell, Chris Johanson, Josh Lazcano, Alicia McCarthy, Clare Rojas, and her husband Barry McGee. She is considered to have been part of the San Francisco Mission School art movement.
[edit] References
[edit] Further reading
- Alex Baker, Margaret Kilgallen, Eungie Joo, and Susan Sollins. 2005. Margaret Kilgallen : In the Sweet Bye & Bye. Oakland: California Institute of the Arts. ISBN 0974983128
- Aaron Rose and Christian Strike (editors). 2004. Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art and Street Culture. ISBN 1891024744
[edit] External links
- "Margaret Kilgallen" on Art:21, PBS.com, 2005.
- "Margaret Kilgallen", UCLA Hammer Museum, 2000.
- "Rising young artist Margaret Kilgallen dead at 33" by John Sanford, Stanford Report, July 23, 2001.
- "Elegy for Margaret" by Stephanie Lee Jackson.
- Review of Kilgallen's "To Friend or Foe" exhibition (New York Times, October 1, 1999)
