Alicia McCarthy

Background

McCarthy was born in 1969 and grew up in Oakland, California.

Education

She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1993 and an Master of Fine Arts from University of California Berkeley in 2005.

Career

Her work is considered to have Naïve or Folk character, and often uses unconventional media like housepaint, graphite, or other found materials. McCarthy"s art features punk messages transformed into poetic and geometric forms. 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.

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.

She is currently based in Oakland, California. McCarthy currently lives and works in San Francisco, and incorporates California"s culture into her much of her work.

McCarthy"s work, as part of the larger Mission School movement, is a direct response to the Dot-com bubble"s effect on San Francisco"s urban development. 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".

Ironically, McCarthy is now featured as a part of SFAI"s notable alumni.

Fertile Ground: Art and Community in California, Oakland Museum of California (September, 2014)

Snobody, V1 Gallery (January, 2015)

Landscape: the virtual, the actual, the possible?, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (October, 2014)

PIEROGI X X: Twentieth Anniversary Exhibition, Pierogi (September, 2014)

Alicia McCarthy + Jenny Sharaf, Johansson Projects (June, 2014)

ENERGY THAT Instruction Section ALL AROUND/Mission School: Chris Johanson, Margaret Kilgallen, Alicia McCarthy, Barry McGee, Ruby Neri, Grey Art Gallery, New York University (April, 2014).

Achievements

• She is the 2013 winner of the Artadia Award and was both a 1995 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture fellow and a 1999 fellow at the Headlands Center for the Arts residency program

Views

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.

Membership

She is a member of San Francisco"s Mission School art movement.