Got A Girl Crush On: Bay-area artist, Margaret Kilgallen

For representing and inspiring ladies in the street art world and beyond.

She sadly died in 2001 at only the age of 33 from complications with breast cancer. She was pregnant and refused to give up her baby in order to receive cancer treatment. Her child, Asha, and her husband/artist Barry McGee still live in San Francisco.

I like things that are handmade and I like to see people’s hand in the world, anywhere in the world; it doesn’t matter to me where it is. And in my own work, I do everything by hand. I don’t project or use anything mechanical, because even though I do spend a lot of time trying to perfect my line work and my hand, my hand will always be imperfect because it’s human. And I think it’s the part that’s off that’s interesting, that even if I’m doing really big letters and I spend a lot of time going over the line and over the line and trying to make it straight, I’ll never be able to make it straight. From a distance it might look straight, but when you get close up, you can always see the line waver. And I think that’s where the beauty is.

(screen shots from the amazing doc “Beautiful Losers” – now streaming on Netflix about the lives and careers of the collective group of DIY artists and designers during the 1990s)