Margaret Kilgallen
Margaret Leisha Kilgallen 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 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. Because of her exposure to bluegrass music as a child, Kilgallen became an accomplished banjo player. Kilgallen herself described a personal interest in old-time music. She received a BFA in studio art and printmaking from Colorado College in 1989. After moving to San Francisco, she took up surfing and in 1990 met her future husband Barry McGee, who was also a surfer. After her time at Colorado College, Kilgallen had a few solo exhibitions in New York and California during 1997 through 1999. She also received a MFA from Stanford University in 2001.In the fall of 1999 she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and had a mastectomy. She opted to forgo chemotherapy. Her doctor didn't disagree with this decision, because with chemotherapy she would decrease her risk of a recurrence within five years by just 2 or 3%. After regular follow up visits she was given a clean bill of health. During her pregnancy she learned that the cancer had returned and had metastasized to her liver. Asha, her daughter with her husband and collaborator Barry McGee, was born healthy but six weeks early on June 7, 2001, almost three weeks before Kilgallen's death at age 33.
During the last months of her life she continued to work on art that would later be displayed in galleries after her death. Kilgallen has since been the subject of several posthumous retrospectives.Image:Kilgallengarage.jpg|240 px|thumb|left|Mural, LACMA parking garage, now torn down, by 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. This was followed by a solo exhibition, Three Sheets to the Wind, at The Drawing Center in New York City in 1997. In 1998, Kilgallen had another solo exhibition, Sincere Sin, at the John Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco, CA. Following that exhibition, Kilgallen had two more solo exhibitions before her death in 2001. These two galleries were her 1999 To Friend and Foe, Deitch Projects, in New York, NY, and in 2000 her solo exhibition Hammer Projects: Margaret Kilgallen, in the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA. 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 titled, In the Sweet Bye & Bye, was shown at the Gallery at REDCAT. Her work was also an important part of the 2004–2006 touring exhibit, Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art and Street Culture. In 2011, Kilgallen's Summer Selections exhibit was shown in the Ratio 3 gallery in San Francisco, CA. Through Jan 12-Jun 16, 2019, the Aspen Art Museum is showing Margaret Kilgallen: That's Where the Beauty is, a survey of her work from 1997 to 2001.
Other galleries that have exhibited her work include the Luggage Store Gallery 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.