SFMOMA, Part 21: Floor 2, 1900 to Now. Untitled (Alicia McCarthy, 2017).
Eight feet square, and it breathes. Untitled (2017) is two wood panels hung as one composition, ninety-six inches by ninety-six, painted in Alicia McCarthy's signature triad — gouache, spray paint, house paint — in bands of high-keyed color that weave over and under one another like a textile. Jerry Saltz described her grids as "rattletrap wobbly painted grids of high-keyed colored bars that weave over and pop under one another in patterns that form in the mind then disappear… simultaneously convex, concave, caving in, and breathing." Stand in front of it and the weave won't sit still. The colors advance and recede. The wood grain shows through at the edges, unpainted, because she never alters the sides or cuts the boards — she paints what she finds, and the finding is part of the painting.
McCarthy begins every work in the middle and expands outward — no underdrawing, no master grid. Each color is mixed just before application, never used straight from the tube, determined by the tone that came before it. She embraces drips and splatters and never overworks a line. The result is a weave with no loom: the warp and weft of spray-painted bars, wobbling, handmade, precise in their imprecision. SFMOMA bought it in 2017 through an Accessions Committee Fund purchase — committee money, institutional significance — in the same year she won the museum's SECA Art Award. The award and the acquisition were effectively one gesture: the museum anointing and collecting, in a single season, the Mission School's long-overlooked abstractionist.
She was born in 1969 in Oakland and never left — BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (1994), MFA from UC Berkeley (2007), taught at SFAI and CCA, lives and works in Oakland still. She is a core member of the Mission School, the loose 1990s scene the critic Glen Helfand named in 2002: graffiti, skateboarding, indie music, queer punk politics, zines, the pre-gentrified Mission. The Grey Art Gallery's 2014 survey fixed the canon at five — McCarthy, Margaret Kilgallen, Barry McGee, Chris Johanson, Ruby Neri. Beautiful Losers carried them into the museums. And within that five, McCarthy was always the outlier: the abstractionist in a figurative crowd, the weaver in a scene of taggers, the quietest star. While McGee and Kilgallen became the king and queen, she stayed in Oakland making paintings out of found wood and hardware-store paint.
Me and the wood
"It came out of me not liking to shop, and I don't like new things. It just felt unnecessary to buy canvas and not very inspiring, to be honest. So, when I find wood, I never alter the sides or cut it. Also, I see it as a collaboration. I see all materials as a collaboration… I like the idea of working with something that somebody threw away… It's just more interesting to me, and I think I kind of relate to it."
That's McCarthy on her materials, and it's the whole ethic. She keeps some boards for a decade before painting them. She taught a class at CCA called Low Budget High Art — students working with found materials, because that's what she works with. For her 2019 Wexner mural she painted with leftover paint from the museum's previous exhibitions: "In that way, the process becomes the content, an accrual of gestures, exchanges, and experiences." Found house paint is hardware-store democracy — cheap, unprecious, already carrying the previous life of a wall. The spray can gives her a line no brush can: "There's a line and a gesture and a spray with a spray can that you cannot get with a brush."
The punk credential is material, not subject. She didn't roll with the graffiti crews — "I was too scared to go out with Barry McGee and all of them," she said — she went out alone, marking corporate buildings with a "pockmark" tag. In 1992 the SFAI Dean of Students wrote her an angry letter saying her campus graffiti "looks like shit." The letter was displayed as an artifact in the Grey Art Gallery's 2014 survey, where the irony was noted: the institution that called her graffiti shit now hails the Mission School as one of the best things to come out of SFAI. She weaves her friends into the work literally — in the SECA show, the curator pointed out a small "eot" hidden in the weave, the curator's initials. A weaver weaving her people into the cloth.
Two canonizations
On the same floor, a few galleries away, hangs Margaret Kilgallen's Untitled (2000) — twenty-three feet of hand-painted canvas, acquired 2012, eleven years after her death at thirty-three. And here is McCarthy's Untitled (2017) — eight feet square, acquired 2017, in the artist's lifetime, in her award year, with committee money. Two women of the same 1990s Mission scene. One canonized in grief; one canonized in middle age. Kilgallen's works came through major gifts and exchanges, the posthumous machinery. McCarthy's was purchased — the museum buying, not receiving. The contrast is the hinge this whole floor turns on: how institutions remember the dead versus how they recognize the living, and how long the living sometimes have to wait. McCarthy's first major museum presentation was the 2017 SECA — two decades into the work. She had gallery representation all along, reviews from Saltz and Roberta Smith, but no U.S. museum solo to this day. The Floor 2 hang is the correction, not the discovery.
And there's a third woman in the room: Agnes Martin, whose gallery is on the same floor. Martin's hand-drawn pencil grids are the high-modernist ancestor; McCarthy's wobbling spray-painted bars are their scrappy Mission-district descendants — same meditative repetition, zero mysticism, all color. The weave motif is routinely read against quilting, against Anni Albers — the grid as a loom, women's work reclaimed. McCarthy's version replaces the loom with the spray can and the studio with a scavenged plank: Bauhaus weaving crossed with hardware-store punk. Martin keeps watch over the grids. The lineage is in the room.
"The innate elitism of the art world is something that's bothered me," McCarthy said in 2015, "mainly because I have a lot of friends that can't afford to go to these spaces or feel outside of them… I think it's more of an aesthetic politicism." On her Tenderloin murals: "I'm not trying to illustrate anything. It is just color and lines and you see exactly what goes into it. There is no manipulation. My work is just about adaptation and context." No manipulation. Color and lines. What you see is what went into it — the wood, the spray, the hand, the friends' initials hidden in the weave. The aesthetic politicism is the refusal to hide the making.
So here's the thesis: McCarthy's weave is a grid that refuses to behave like one. The modernist grid — Martin, Albers, the whole high tradition — promises order, transcendence, the escape from the hand. McCarthy's grid wobbles, drips, breathes; it's painted on trash wood with house paint, started from the middle, mixed one color at a time. It keeps the grid's meditation and discards its mysticism. It is, as the SECA curator put it, "pattern and order and rigor" with "a casualness and looseness in that order." Eight feet square, and it breathes. The museum bought it the year it finally noticed her. The wood was waiting a decade. Some things take a while. The weave doesn't mind. 🌁
Timeline — Alicia McCarthy
1969 — born in Oakland, California
1992 — SFAI dean writes that her graffiti "looks like shit"
1994 — BFA, San Francisco Art Institute
2002 — critic Glen Helfand coins "Mission School"
2004–06 — Beautiful Losers; the scene enters the museums
2007 — MFA, UC Berkeley; teaches Low Budget High Art at CCA
2014 — Energy That Is All Around, Grey Art Gallery, NYU; the dean's letter on display
2017 — SECA Art Award, SFMOMA; museum acquires Untitled (2017)
2019 — No Straight Lines, Wexner Center; first site-specific mural, painted with leftover paint