Margaret Kilgallen

Margaret Kilgallen
Birth name	Margaret Leisha Kilgallen
Born	October 28, 1967(1967-10-28) Washington, D.C.
Died	June 26, 2001(2001-06-26) (aged 33) San Francisco, California
Nationality	American
Field	Painting, printmaking, and graffiti
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 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.

Life and career

Kilgallen was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up nearby in Kensington, Maryland. She received a BA in printmaking from Colorado College in 1989 and an MFA from Stanford University in 2001.

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.

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

Kilgallen's first major group exhibitions appeared 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 for 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 in San Francisco; Forum for Contemporary Art in St. Louis; the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia; and The Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

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. At an early age, she was impressed by examples of works by Southwest and Mexican artists, and she employed these artists' use of warm colors in her own painting. Her many works in gouache and acrylic on found paper (often discarded book endpapers) reflect an interest in 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 commissioned mural work, Kilgallen was also a graffiti artist under the tag names "Meta" and "Matokie Slaughter."^[10] The latter name, a homage to folk musician Matokie Slaughter, was specifically used for freight train graffiti, a hobo tradition that strongly influenced her work. Kilgallen was an accomplished banjo player and became an avid surfer after moving to California.

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.^[11]

Relationship to other artists

Kilgallen had close ties with a number of other artists. These artists include, besides her husband and collaborator Barry McGee, Chris Johanson, Josh Lazcano, Alicia McCarthy, Clare Rojas, Amy Franceschini, Thomas Campbell, Dan Flanagan, Symantha Gates, Nell Gould, filmmaker Bill Daniel, and musician Tommy Guerrero, for whom she designed album covers.

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. ^ Transit Project (1996) Meta "Meta." Online collection of graffiti art.
11. ^ "Margaret Kilgallen" on Art:21, PBS.com, 2005.

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

External links

• Biography, interviews, essays, artwork images and video clips from PBS series Art:21 -- Art in the Twenty-First Century - Season 1 (2001).
• "Margaret Kilgallen, a San Francisco Artist, Dies at 33" by Roberta Smith, New York Times, July 4, 2001.
• "S.F. graffiti artist Margaret Kilgallen" by David Bonetti, San Francisco Chronicle, July 7, 2001.
• "Rising young artist Margaret Kilgallen dead at 33" by John Sanford, Stanford Report, July 23, 2001.
• "Elegy for Margaret" by Stephanie Lee Jackson.
• "Margaret Kilgallen, Gallery 16"^{[dead link]} by Maria Porges, ArtForum, May 1997.
• "Femme Vital: Margaret Kilgallen Hand in Hand" by Michele Lockwood, Super X Media #2.2, 1998.
• "Art in Review: Margaret Kilgallen — 'To Friend and Foe'" by Holland Cotter, New York Times, October 1, 1999.
• "Finding Margaret - a project at the Luggage Store Gallery" by sketchypad.

Persondata
Name	Kilgallen, Margaret
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	October 28, 1967
Place of birth	Washington, D.C.
Date of death	June 26, 2001
Place of death	San Francisco, California