Site-specific mural by Mission School artist Alicia McCarthy rounds out suite of winter 2019 exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts

In early 2019, acclaimed Bay Area artist Alicia McCarthy will travel to Columbus to begin work on a site-specific mural for the lower lobby of the Wexner Center of the Arts at The Ohio State University. Curated by Lucy I. Zimmerman, newly appointed Assistant Curator for the multidisciplinary art space, Alicia McCarthy: No Straight Lines completes a suite of exhibitions by LGBTQI artists at the Wex for the winter season.  The mural will debut to the public on February 2, 2019, in conjunction with the openings of John Waters: Indecent Exposure and Peter Hujar: Speed of Life.

“I’m thrilled to bring Alicia McCarthy to the Wex to create her first site-specific mural in the Midwest,” says Zimmerman. “Situating Alicia’s irregular ‘negative weave’ painting in the lower lobby will provide a dynamic contrast to the apparent and underlying geometries in the architecture of the Wex, especially the intersection of Ohio State’s campus and the city’s grid. Moreover, the ethos of Alicia McCarthy’s artistic practice—a sincere and cultivated investment in place and community, and a commitment to using available resources—speaks to Columbus’s own active DIY culture.” 

McCarthy is associated with the so-called Mission School that emerged among a group of students and others affiliated with the San Francisco Art Institute in the 1990s—before gentrification and the dot com boom and bust radically shifted the landscape of the Mission District and the city of San Francisco as a whole. These artists, including Ruby Neri, Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen, and Chris Johanson, among others, embraced the “urban rustic” aesthetic. McCarthy’s work has been influenced by queer and punk subcultures, graffiti, DIY, and folk art. Her practice has also been shaped by her time at Humboldt State University, prior to studying in San Francisco, where she was part of another close-knit artist community with peers like Harrell Fletcher and Virgil Shaw. 

McCarthy is best known for abstract paintings that frequently incorporate found elements or recycled materials and pay homage to the surrounding community. She embraces the fundamental potential of line to develop synergistic compositions where the nature of each painted line is in conversation with all those around it. The resulting nexus of layered, vibrantly colored lines is at once controlled yet entropic, intimate yet tough. 

"My work is formally simple in that lines and colors are woven together, building a composition," McCarthy explains. "But this mural is a reflection of what stands in front of it: the intersection of people within a community. The colors I’m using are primarily leftover paint from accent walls in previous gallery exhibitions the Wexner has presented so it has a direct relationship to the place. In that way, the process becomes the content, an accrual of gestures, exchanges, and experiences."