CLEVELAND, Ohio — The urge to unplug and lead a simple, rustic life has been a dream in American culture at least since Henry David Thoreau.
Something of that spirit applies to the art of Margaret Kilgallen, a brilliant, widely acclaimed San Francisco artist who died in 2001 of complications from breast cancer at age 33, and whose work is the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland.
Courtenay Finn, the museum’s chief curator, organized the show originally for the Aspen Art Museum, where she previously served as its senior curator.
The show assembles works from Kilgallen exhibitions held during the last four years of her life at the Drawing Center in New York, Hammer Projects in Los Angeles and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.
It demonstrates first and foremost how Kilgallen perfected a winsome, wistful, style reminiscent of outsider, or folk art.
She populated her pictures with cartoonish images of trees, surfboard-riding women, dive bars in coastal California, plus names, words and phrases painted in elaborate, old-timey fonts reminiscent of circuses or county fair midways.
Killgallen’s work has a strangely anachronistic aura, as if it could have been made in the 1920s or 30s in some homespun rural area, rather than amid a Bay Area tech economy that began rapidly minting dot-com gazillionaires during Kilgallen’s lifetime.
As installed at MOCA, the show emphasizes Kilgallen’s predilection for painting stark, simple, repetitious, graffiti-like images of heroic women inspired by swimmer Sarah “Fanny” Durack, an Australian who won a gold medal at the 1912 Olympics, or Matokie Slaughter, (1919-1999) an American clawhammer banjo player.
In this sense, the show portrays Kilgallen as a feminist artist who wished to elevate heroic depictions of women in contemporary art.
But the show speaks at least as eloquently about how Kilgallen’s work fulfills a cultural need for art and life stories that revolve around the desire to withdraw from the high-tech age and live a simple, authentic life in search of inspiration and happiness on the fringe.
Perhaps for that reason, Kilgallen’s work enjoys a near cult-like following today. According to a story published in 2015 by New Yorker writer Dana Goodyear, some of the artist’s followers have tattooed images of Kilgallen’s art on their bodies.
“Charismatic in life, she was sainted in death,’’ Goodyear wrote.
During her brief career, Kilgallen came to be known as an unofficial leader of the Mission School, a group of loosely affiliated artists who came of age in the 1990s and 2000s as the dot-com boom took hold.
At the time, San Francisco’s Mission District, located just south of the city’s financial district, was still a low rent neighborhood and a haven for artists who worked in styles critics described as “New Folk,’’ or “Urban Rustic.’’
Goodyear describes Kilgallen leading a somewhat marginal existence with her husband and surfing partner, the noted Mission School artist Barry McGee. They lived first in a warehouse building and later in a two-story row house in the Mission, which they filled with “skateboards, surfboards, paintings, thrift-store clothes, and other useful junk.”
They prowled the city, painting graffiti, and traveled up and down the West Coast, tagging train cars with their paintings and secret nicknames.
The PBS documentary series, Art 21, filmed Kilgallen adorning rail cars, for example, with portraits of Matokie Slaughter.
For her day job, Kilgallen worked as a book conservator at the San Francisco Public Library, a job that provided the side benefit of giving the artist access to pieces of used paper that she collected and used for paintings.
Despite her lifestyle, Kilgallen was hardly an art world outsider. A native of Washington, D.C., she earned a bachelor of arts in printmaking and studio art at Colorado College in 1989, and followed up with a master-of-fine-arts degree from Stanford University, the epicenter of the tech boom, in 2001, less than 10 days before her death.
The MOCA show includes 112 examples of Kilgallen’s works, many of which are small, untitled paintings on worn pieces of found wood, metal and paper. They function like words or phrases in a sentence that could be arranged or rearranged on a wall to create a variety of combinations and compositions.
As the show proceeds chronologically, the scale of Kilgallen’s works increase, culminating in “Main Drag,’’ a room-size installation originally prepared for exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.
Comprised of wall paintings and structures reminiscent of towering dollhouses, or surf shacks, it is especially noteworthy for its crisp, abbreviated depiction of seaside landscapes lined with liquor stores, dive bars, smokestack industries and surf shops.
The general impression is that Kilgallen’s art was on an upswing, gaining in force, focus and scale in the years and months leading up to her untimely death.
The Goodyear article suggests that at the time, Kilgallen was living in a state of highly focused energy and denial. Pregnant with her first child, and suffering from a tumor that had metastasized to her liver, she worked to exhaustion on the “Main Drag’’ installation, at times sleeping in one of the two structures on view in the MOCA show.
Kilgallen gave birth to her daughter, Asha, in San Francisco, on June 7, 2001, as the show’s catalog states. She received her MFA 10 days later, and died just nine days after that.
It’s a tribute to Kilgallen that the MOCA show ends on the high note of the “Main Drag’’ installation, leaving you wondering what she might have accomplished had she lived.
REVIEW
What’s up: "Margaret Kilgallen: that’s where the beauty is''
Venue: Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland
Where: 11400 Euclid Ave., Cleveland
When: Through Sunday, May 17
Admission: Free. Call 216-421-8671 or go to mocacleveland.org