Margaret Kilgallen

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Margaret Kilgallen
Birth name Margaret Leisha Kilgallen
Born 1967
Washington, D.C.
Died June 26, 2001
San Francisco, California
Nationality American
Field Painting, printmaking, and grafitti
Training Colorado College (BFA, 1989),
Stanford University (MFA, 2001)
Movement Mission School
Awards San Francisco Arts Commission – Individual Grant: Cultural Equity (1997)
Fleishhacker Foundation – Eureka Fellowship (1998)[1]

Margaret Kilgallen (1967-2001) 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. She died in 2001 of complications from breast cancer and has since been the subject of several posthumous retrospectives.

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[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.

She died of complications from breast cancer on June 26, 2001, in San Francisco.

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

Kilgallen's first major group exhibitions were in 1997 and included the first Bay Area Now show at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts,[2] [3] soon followed by a solo exhibition at The Drawing Center in New York City. In 2000, she and Barry McGee had a featured exhibition at the UCLA Hammer Museum.[4] A number of major exhibitions took place after her death. In 2002, her work was chosen to be shown in that year's Whitney Biennial. In 2005, a survey of her work was shown at the Gallery at REDCAT.[5] [6] Her work was also an important part of the 2004–2006 touring exhibit, Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art and Street Culture.[7] [8] [9]

Other galleries that have exhibited her work include the Luggage Store in San Francisco; Gallery 16, San Francisco; Forum for Contemporary Art, St. Louis; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.

[edit] Work

Kilgallen's 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.

In addition to her comissioned mural work, Kilgallen was also a graffiti artist under the tag names "Meta" and "Matokie Slaughter". The latter name, an homage to graffiti artist and folk musician Matokie Slaughter, was specifically used for freight train graffiti, a hobo tradition that strongly influenced her work.

[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." [10]

[edit] Relationship to other artists

Kilgallen had close ties with a number of other artists, notably, her husband and collaborator Barry McGee, as well as artists Chris Johanson, Josh Lazcano, Alicia McCarthy, Clare Rojas, Thomas Campbell, Dan Flanagan, filmmaker Bill Daniel, and musician Tommy Guerrero. She is considered to have been part of the San Francisco Mission School art movement.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Baker, Alex (editor). (2005). Margaret Kilgallen : In the Sweet Bye & Bye. Valencia, CA: California Institute of the Arts. ISBN 0-9749831-2-8
  2. ^ "The young at art" by David Bonetti, San Francisco Examiner, June 18, 1997.
  3. ^ Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. 1997. Bay Area Now: A Regional Survey of Contemporary Art.
  4. ^ "Margaret Kilgallen", UCLA Hammer Museum, 2000.
  5. ^ "Margaret Kilgallen: In the Sweet Bye & Bye", REDCAT website, June 15, 2005.
  6. ^ "Margaret Kilgallen" (press release), REDCAT website, June 20, 2005.
  7. ^ "Beautiful Losers", Contemporary Arts Center (website), March 13, 2004.
  8. ^ "Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art and Street Culture", Orange County Museum of Art (website), February 6, 2005.
  9. ^ "Beautiful Losers" Fondazione La Triennale, Milano, February 17, 2006.
  10. ^ "Margaret Kilgallen" on Art:21, PBS.com, 2005.

[edit] Further reading

  • Berry, Colin. (2003). Like a folk tale. Print 57(1):102-107. (Abstract)
  • Rose, Aaron and Strike, Christian (editors). (2004). Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art and Street Culture. ISBN 1-891024-74-4

[edit] External links

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