Margaret Kilgallen: From Graffiti to Museums


Margaret Kilgallen

by Ben Kokkelenberg on May 13

 

Untitled (around 2000). Courtesy the Estate of Margaret Kilgallen and Ratio 3. San Francisco

Margaret Kilgallen, born on October 28, 1967 in Washington D.C, grew up in the San Francisco area. She was immersed in bluegrass music, and learned to play the banjo. This musical  led her to draw the sounds she heard without knowing what she was drawing. Her drawings in the beginning focused on heroines and  on empowering women. As her artwork progressed, she chose the medium of graffiti to display her art for the world.

Art21’s documentary “Place” created in 2001, shows an interview with Kilgallen in which she talks about her inspirations and her artwork. She explains why she enjoys displaying her art through graffiti. Kilgallen says, “the viewer looks at graffiti and sees garbage and I always wonder why they don’t look at billboards, [especially around San Francisco, there’s millions everywhere] isn’t that garbage, that’s like mind garbage.” Kilgallen’s artwork evolved from graffiti to room-size murals, more similar to contemporary museum art.

Pilar 1999

She would go on to exhibit in several group shows in various San Francisco galleries, and later on had solo exhibitions in some of the most notable art cities and museums. Throughout her career, she worked with several artists, including husband Barry McGee and Phill Ross. Her life ended abruptly in July of 2001 when she lost her fight to breast cancer. Her legacy, however, will always remain because of her various artworks. 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Maya Lin: More Than Just a Monument

Image
  Maya Lin, Ecliptic, 2001, Concret  Maya Lin: More Than Just a Monument April 19, 2021, Anissa Quankep      Maya Lin participated in an Art21 documentary giving us a closer look into her work. Art21 allowed us to be part of the artistic process of Eliptical, an urban park in Grand Rapids Michigan. Eliptical was a made in 2 001 and is a refurbished ice rink made from the park. Lin is best known for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a project that she designed in her early twenties. Since then she has fallen into the category of a "monument artist," a label she dislikes. During her Art21 interview Identity , Lin states ". . .had I not done the Vietnam memorial. . .I would be called an artist five years sooner. But because I had done the Vietnam Memorial, it was like "Oh you make monuments," or whatever that means." Lin is a contemporary artist who practices art through architecture, making it harder for galleries and museums to showcase her work. Robert...
Read more

Leonard Suryajaya, A Refreshing Take on Sophistication

Image
Wrestling trauma through “Dream Vessels,” aka photographs.   by Anna Silverstein April 1, 2021 Virtual Reality (2017) Leonard Suryajaya is an artist who lacks concern for performative elitism, winning me over with his authenticity during a live Zoom talk he led at CSUF. Due to the level of sophistication of his work, I was surprised by his approachability and down-to-earth demeanor. Although Suryajaya considers himself a photographer, his process could be seen as theatrical performance. Suryajaya’s theatre background not only gives him set design skills, allowing him to create amazing installations and photographs, but also, his Zoom presentation was inadvertently a captivating and moving performance of its own. The talk was marked with refreshing candor, and relatable trauma “over-sharing”.   The juxtaposition of Suryajaya’s incriminating honesty with the hyper sophistication of his work is one of the artist’s many dichotomies. As an eternal outsider on a quest to fit in, th...
Read more