Alicia McCarthy
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Alicia McCarthy (born 1969) is an American painter. She is a member of San Francisco's
Mission School A mission school or missionary school is a religious school originally developed and run by Christian missionaries. The mission school was commonly used in the colonial era for the purposes of Westernization of local people. These may be day s ...
art movement. Her work is considered to have
Naïve Naivety (also spelled naïvety), naiveness, or naïveté is the state of being naive. It refers to an apparent or actual lack of experience and sophistication, often describing a neglect of pragmatism in favor of moral idealism. A ''naïve'' may ...
or
Folk Folk or Folks may refer to: Sociology *Nation *People * Folklore ** Folk art ** Folk dance ** Folk hero ** Folk horror ** Folk music *** Folk metal *** Folk punk *** Folk rock ** Folk religion * Folk taxonomy Arts, entertainment, and media * Fo ...
character, and often uses unconventional media like housepaint, graphite, or other
found materials A found object (a calque from the French ''objet trouvé''), or found art, is art created from undisguised, but often modified, items or product (business), products that are not normally considered materials from which art is made, often becaus ...
. She is based in Oakland, California.


Early life, family, and education

McCarthy was born in 1969, and grew up in Oakland, California. She received her BFA degree from the
San Francisco Art Institute San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) was a Private college, private art school, college of contemporary art in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1871, SFAI was one of the oldest art schools in the United States and the oldest west of the Mis ...
in 1994; and an MFA degree from the
University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...
in 2007. While attending undergraduate in 1992, the dean of the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) addressed an angry letter criticizing her campus graffiti, claiming that her art "looks like shit". She also attended the
Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture is an artists residency located in Madison, Maine, just outside of Skowhegan. Every year, the program accepts online applications from emerging artists from November through January, and selects 65 ...
in Maine. Her romantic partner is artist Sahar Khoury.


Career

McCarthy was a key member of the Mission School movement, a punk artistic movement born in San Francisco. McCarthy painted graffiti under the names Fancy and Probe. She was a member of underground punk and LGBT movements in San Francisco in the early 1990s. The Jack Hanley Gallery (San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York) has represented McCarthy for over 15 years including a solo New York City show and a two-person exhibition. In 2015, McCarthy had two major exhibitions: Snobody at V1 Gallery in Copenhagen and also Alicia McCarthy + Jenny Sharaf at Johansson Projects in Oakland. Most recently McCarthy participated in Major Work, curated by Andrew Schoultz at Chandran Gallery, San Francisco, and has also recently participated in Patterned Chaos at Cinders, New York, Off the Grid, curated by Susette Min at EN EM Art Space, Sacramento, Fertile Ground: Art and Community in California at The Oakland Museum of California Art and Pierogi X X: Twentieth Anniversary Exhibition at Pierogi in New York. In 2013, McCarthy exhibited in Energy That Is All Around: Mission School with Chris Johanson, Margaret Kilgallen, Alicia McCarthy, Barry McGee, Ruby Neri at the Walter and McBean Galleries, San Francisco Art Institute and the Grey Art Gallery, New York University. McCarthy currently lives and works in Oakland, and incorporates California's culture into her much of her work. Although she has not been arrested since 2000, McCarthy has participated and advocated for the use of graffiti and street art in protest of
capitalism Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their use for the purpose of obtaining profit. This socioeconomic system has developed historically through several stages and is defined by ...
. McCarthy's work, as part of the larger Mission School movement, is a direct response to the
Dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (or dot-com boom) was a stock market bubble that ballooned during the late-1990s and peaked on Friday, March 10, 2000. This period of market growth coincided with the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web and the Interne ...
's effect on San Francisco's urban development.


Mission School

The Mission School was composed of five artists all born in the late 1960s and living and working in the 1990s in San Francisco's Mission District when it was still a low-rent neighborhood. The artists bonded over punk music, skateboarding, graffiti, queer politics and zine publishing, and they shared an appreciation for funky cartooning, offbeat social satire, quirky abstraction, folk art and old-fashioned graphic styles. Combining craft/folk art and urban street and graffiti culture, Alicia McCarthy and this Mission School group of artists cultivated an art style that prized the handmade in an increasingly technologized society. McCarthy's art featured punk messages transformed into poetic and geometric forms.


Style and materials

McCarthy creates abstract paintings that fuse the aesthetics of American punk with those of outsider artists (a style sometimes referred to as "urban rustic"). She uses a variety of different kinds of paint (gouache, house paint, spray paint), often on found wood or paper and sometimes including text. Her radiating zigzags, interweaving lines, and stripes of bright colors have a handmade quality that appear as if they are moving with an internal energy. Found objects, text, and spray paint often make their way into these wood surfaces, so that McCarthy's colorful woven patterns and geometric blocks become personalized beyond their shapes. McCarthy's paintings are visually abstract, and yet her deceptively simple motifs — a weave or rainbow, for instance — are deeply personal and her works often include a clue of her personal and physical presence, such as the ring left by a coffee cup, print from a boot or a note written by the artist.


Works

She is best known for her weave paintings, in which multi-colored lines weave together. She is also known for her series of color wheels, composed of shattered and interlocking arcs of color. She was also one of fifteen Bay Artists commissioned in 2015 by
Meta Meta most commonly refers to: * Meta (prefix), a common affix and word in English ( in Greek) * Meta Platforms, an American multinational technology conglomerate (formerly ''Facebook, Inc.'') Meta or META may also refer to: Businesses * Meta (ac ...
(formerly Facebook Inc.) to create a site specific spray paint mural for their new
Frank Gehry Frank Owen Gehry ( ; ; born February 28, 1929) is a Canadian-American architect and designer. A number of his buildings, including his private residence in Santa Monica, California, have become attractions. Gehry rose to prominence in th ...
-designed Menlo Park headquarters. In 2018, McCarthy painted her largest-to-date mural (some eight stories high) on the side of the Proper Hotel in the Tenderloin District. McCarthy's recent work shows a selective color palette on mixed-media panels to create art that is both intense and playful.


Exhibitions

McCarthy's work has been shown at the Dallas Museum of Art, the Berkeley Art Center, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Her work was featured at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in July 2017. In 2013, her work was included in a major traveling exhibition, which was shown at the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the Grey Art Gallery at New York University. *Fertile Ground: Art and Community in California, ''Oakland Museum of California'' (Sep, 2014) *Snobody, ''V1 Gallery'' (Jan, 2015) *Landscape: the virtual, the actual, the possible?, ''Yerba Buena Center for the Arts'' (Oct, 2014) *PIEROGI X X: Twentieth Anniversary Exhibition, ''Pierogi'' (Sep, 2014) *Alicia McCarthy + Jenny Sharaf, ''Johansson Projects'' (Jun, 2014) *ENERGY THAT IS ALL AROUND/Mission School:
Chris Johanson Chris Johanson is an American painter and street artist. He is a member of San Francisco's Mission School art movement. Biography Johanson was born in suburban San Jose, California in 1968. He grew up skateboarding, attending punk rock shows ...
,
Margaret Kilgallen Margaret Leisha Kilgallen (October 28, 1967 – June 26, 2001) was a San Francisco Bay Area artist who combined graffiti art, painting, and installation art. Though a contemporary artist, her work showed a strong influence from folk art. She was ...
, Alicia McCarthy,
Barry McGee Barry McGee (born 1966) is an American artist. He is known for graffiti art, and a pioneer of the Mission School art movement. McGee is known by his monikers: Twist, Ray Fong, Bernon Vernon, and P.Kin. Life and education Barry McGee was born in ...
,
Ruby Neri Ruby Rose Neri (born 1970) is an American visual artist, known for her work as a sculptor, and painter. She was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, drawing creative influence from her parents and their friends. Neri is both a painter an ...
, ''
Grey Art Gallery The Grey Art Museum, known until 2023 as the Grey Art Gallery, is New York University's fine art museum. As a university art museum, the Grey Art Gallery functions to collect, preserve, study, document, interpret, and exhibit the evidence of h ...
, NYU'' (Apr, 2014) *Alicia McCarthy, ''Berggruen Gallery'' (March 2017)


''Energy that is All Around''

Energy that Is All Around was a formative exhibition of
Mission School A mission school or missionary school is a religious school originally developed and run by Christian missionaries. The mission school was commonly used in the colonial era for the purposes of Westernization of local people. These may be day s ...
artists, curated by Natasha Boas at the San Francisco Art Institute. In response to the technology bubble of the ’90s, the Mission School artists sought to "detechnologize" contemporary art and reengage with folk and craft art.


Awards and fellowships

* 2017 SECA (Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art) Award * 2013 Artadia Award * 1995 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture fellow * 1999 fellow at the Headlands Center for the Arts residency program.


References


External links


"Copenhagen Gets a Taste of San Francisco in Alicia McCarthy’s First European Solo Show"

ArtSlant Magazine
{{DEFAULTSORT:McCarthy, Alicia 1969 births Living people American contemporary painters American feminist artists 21st-century American women painters 21st-century American painters Artists from Oakland, California Painters from California 20th-century American painters 20th-century American women painters San Francisco Art Institute alumni University of California, Berkeley alumni American graffiti artists Women graffiti artists