Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Painting, Drawing, Printmaking, Mural
Website: jackhanley.com/artists/alicia-mccarthy
Alicia McCarthy was born in 1969 in Oakland, California, the daughter of a mechanic and a nurse. She studied at Humboldt State University in Arcata before earning her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1994 and her MFA from the University of California, Berkeley in 2007. She also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. McCarthy has lived and worked in Oakland throughout her career, and is a core figure of the Mission School — the loose-knit group of artists, including Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen, Ruby Neri, and Chris Johanson, who emerged from San Francisco’s Mission District in the early 1990s around a shared ethic of DIY community-making, graffiti, punk, skateboarding, queer politics, and zine publishing.
McCarthy received the SFMOMA SECA Art Award in 2017, the Artadia San Francisco Award in 2013, and has held residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin and at New Langton Arts in San Francisco. Her work is held in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, the Oakland Museum of California, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, and the MIMA in Brussels, among others. She has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute and California College of the Arts, where she offers a popular course called “Low Budget High Art,” in which students make work using found materials rather than purchased supplies.
McCarthy works on found wood panels and construction paper using spray paint, house paint, acrylic, gouache, crayon, and colored pencil, building up intricate woven compositions through meticulous repetitive mark-making. Her signature imagery consists of interlocking bands of color — weaves, grids, rainbow arcs, and color-wheel fragments — that she constructs from the center of a surface outward, carefully mixing each individual hue before application so that no color is drawn straight from the tube. The result is work that balances structural rigor with a loose, handmade warmth: patterns that feel simultaneously planned and alive with drips, splatters, and the traces of physical making.
McCarthy’s practice is rooted in a commitment to using available resources — surplus paints, found wood, discarded materials — and carries an ethos inherited equally from San Francisco’s street art culture and from the modernist color theory she absorbed at SFAI, where she was profoundly influenced by Jay DeFeo’s The Rose and the legacy of painters like Joan Brown. Her work has expanded over the years from small panels to large-scale Plexiglas sheets and monumental public murals, including an eight-story mural on the San Francisco Proper Hotel (2018). Despite the scale, the sensibility remains intimate: as McCarthy has said, “I want my work to reflect all the beauty and pain of everyday life. All woven together and interconnecting.”
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