SFMOMA, Part 14: Floor 2, 1900 to Now. Untitled (Margaret Kilgallen, 2000).
Twenty-three feet of hand-painted canvas, and not a straight line in it. That is the first thing to understand about the Margaret Kilgallen on Floor 2: the scale says mural, the material says banner, and the hand says human — wobbling, deliberate, alive. You stand in front of it and the wall goes warm. Off-key reds, faded yellows, dusty blues, the palette of a circus poster left in the sun. A man and a woman stand in the middle of it, small against all that color, and the intimacy between them is so plain it stops you. In a career built on painting solitary can-do women — heroines nobody had heard of — this is the rare Kilgallen about two people. Painted in 2000. She died in 2001, at thirty-three.
Untitled (2000) is acrylic on unstretched canvas, over twenty-three feet wide — one of the largest paintings Margaret Kilgallen ever made, and one of her last. The surface is worked the way she always worked it: freehand, no stencils, no tape, no projections, the paint often reclaimed from the "oops" pile at the hardware store — mistinted cans nobody wanted, which is exactly why she wanted them. The canvas isn't stretched. It hangs like a banner, like a sign painter's drop cloth, like something meant to be rolled up and carried to the next wall. SFMOMA acquired it in 2012, eleven years after her death, through a pooled purchase heavy enough to signal the museum knew what it was buying: a signature late work by an artist who never got to have a late period.
Flat decorative waves roll across the top. Blocks of color stack like shipping crates. A single tree holds the right side. And in the middle, the couple: he stands facing forward, brow furrowed, eyes meeting yours; she looks away, her gaze aimed at the rest of the canvas, at the color and the tree and everything beyond him. The curator who organized her 2019 Aspen survey likes to think of them as Kilgallen and her husband, the artist Barry McGee. Painted the year after her breast cancer diagnosis and mastectomy, the year before she died — it is hard not to read it as a farewell disguised as a celebration. An intimacy made monumental, in the material language of the hand-painted sign: things made to be read at a glance from across the street, and to fade.
The waver
Kilgallen had a doctrine, and she stated it on camera for Art21 in 2001, months before she died: "I do spend a lot of time trying to perfect my line work… when you get close up, you can always see the line waver. And I think that's where the beauty is."
Read that again. An artist who spent hours perfecting her hand, telling you the point was never perfection — the point was the visible evidence that a human made it. "My hand will always be imperfect because it's human." In 2000, at the peak of the digital image — Photoshop 6.0, the first camera phones — Kilgallen was painting twenty-three-foot banners by hand, sanding them down for a worn surface, mixing colors from other people's mistakes. The waver wasn't a flaw she tolerated. It was the thesis.
This is what separates her from the folk-art revivalists and the street-art transplants. She wasn't borrowing the vernacular as a style. She had trained in it the way a craftsperson trains: years as a book conservator at the San Francisco Public Library in the 1990s, studying bookbinding, letterpress, papermaking, typography. She rode her bicycle around the Mission photographing hand-painted shop signs. She painted freight trains as "Meta" and "Matokie Slaughter" — the second tag a tribute to a folk banjo player, because Kilgallen was also an accomplished banjo player, raised on bluegrass in Maryland, summers in Amish country absorbing how things get made by hand. Every strand of the work comes from an apprenticeship, not an appropriation.
The heroines
"I do have a lot of heroines," she said in a 2000 documentary. "I like to paint images of women who I find inspiring, and I don't like to choose people that everybody knows. I like to choose people who just do small things and yet somehow hit me in my heart."
Her heroines: the folk banjoist Matokie Slaughter. The Australian Olympic swimmer Fanny Durack. Women of perseverance and unusual talents, the wall text says. She painted them the way medieval churches painted saints — flat, frontal, legible, surrounded by their attributes — except her saints were amateur athletes and musicians and working women, and her church was a hand-painted sign.
Which is why the couple in the SFMOMA painting lands so hard. Against a career of solitary women, here are two people, close, at ease. The label calls it "easy and palpable intimacy." If the heroines were about admiration at a distance, this is about the thing she actually had: a partnership with McGee, the graffiti writer turned art star, the father of the daughter she was carrying when she died. Asha was born June 7, 2001, six weeks early. Kilgallen died June 26. Nineteen days. The painting is from the year before — when she knew, when she was working through it, when she chose to make something about closeness instead of something about fear.
The Mission School
Kilgallen is filed, correctly, as a central figure of the Bay Area Mission School — the loose 1990s scene named by critic Glen Helfand in 2002, built from graffiti, skateboarding, indie music, queer punk politics, and zines in the pre-gentrified Mission District. The core, as the Grey Art Gallery's 2014 survey had it: Kilgallen, McGee, Chris Johanson, Alicia McCarthy, Ruby Neri. Beautiful Losers (2004) carried them all into the museums.
But "Mission School" flattens what she was doing. Her lineage runs through Stuart Davis's street jazz, through the Chicago Hairy Who's Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson, through WPA murals and Mexican muralism — a twenty-three-foot hand-painted populist panorama belongs in that line — and through the sign-painter's trade, which is older than all of them. She painted directly on gallery walls (the Hammer Museum in 2000, documented in the Art21 film) and on a LACMA parking garage with McGee, always assuming it was temporary. "I always thought it was a temporary thing," McGee said later. The unstretched SFMOMA canvas is the surviving cousin of that ephemeral practice: a mural that can be rolled up, a monument that refuses to be one.
There's an irony the museum can't quite metabolize, and it's worth sitting with. SFMOMA's own blog carries an essay by a San Franciscan who got a Kilgallen leaf tattooed on her arm, admiring that "instead of waiting for institutional recognition (which she later got), she painted on exposed walls and trash cans." Now she anchors a Floor 2 survey wall. The institution caught up. The question is whether the waver survives the frame.
So here's the thesis, since this series runs on them: Kilgallen's work is an argument that the handmade is not a style but an ethic. The off-key palette, the visible waver, the reclaimed paint, the unstretched canvas, the heroines nobody famous — every choice says the same thing: what you have to make in order to live is worth making well, and worth looking at. "I have always had an admiration for things that are well made, or not even well made," she told an interviewer in 1999. "What you have to make in order to live." She made a twenty-three-foot painting about intimacy, by hand, out of other people's discarded paint, in the last full year of her life. The beauty is in the waver. She told us. 🌁
Timeline — Margaret Kilgallen
1967 — born October 28, Washington, D.C.; raised in Kensington, Maryland
1989 — BA in printmaking and studio art, Colorado College
1990s — book conservator, San Francisco Public Library; studies sign painting, letterpress, typography; paints freight trains as "Meta" and "Matokie Slaughter"
1997 — Three Sheets to the Wind, The Drawing Center, New York
1999 — diagnosed with breast cancer; mastectomy; marries Barry McGee
2000 — paints Untitled (the SFMOMA painting); Hammer Projects, UCLA
2001 — MFA, Stanford; daughter Asha born June 7; dies June 26, age 33
2012 — SFMOMA acquires Untitled (2000)