COLUMBUS, OH.- In early 2019, acclaimed Bay Area artist Alicia McCarthy travelled 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 debuted 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.”

Alicia McCarthy (b. 1969, lives and works in Oakland) received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from the University of California at Berkeley. McCarthy has exhibited extensively throughout the US and internationally in solo and group exhibitions at the Berkley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Oakland Museum of California, White Columns, Grey Art Gallery, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, among other venues.

She has received numerous accolades including the SECA Award from SFMOMA in 2017 and the Artadia Award in 2013, as well as residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Headlands Center for the Arts, and San Francisco’s New Langton Arts. McCarthy has realized site-specific projects at the San Francisco Art Institute and Facebook Headquarters.

Her work is included in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, Savannah College of Art and Design, and MIMA the Millennium Iconoclast Museum of Art in Brussels.