Alicia McCarthy

b. Oakland, CA, 1969

Alicia McCarthy is a Bay Area painter whose work is characterized by recurring motifs of helices, rainbows, spectrums, and weaves, which together build a distinctive visual language of line and color, pigment and pattern. McCarthy is associated with the Mission School, a punk artistic movement born in San Francisco and influenced by street and folk art. She was a graffiti and mural artist in the 1990s and continues to work with unconventional media such as housepaint, spray paint, graphite, and found materials.

McCarthy received her BFA degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1994 and an MFA degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 2007. She also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Her work is included in a number of public and private collections, including SFMOMA, San Francisco, the Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, the American Academy of Arts & Letters, New York, and the Millennium Iconoclast Museum of Art in Brussels (MIMA), Brussels, Belgium.