Margaret Kilgallen owns Main Street

In 2001, at age 33, Margaret Kilgallen received an MFA from Stanford, had her first child with her husband, Barry McGee, and died of breast cancer.
 What she made lives behind her. Her storefront installation, Main Street from 2001, is one of the best things in The Old, Weird America: Folk Themes in Contemporary Art, now at its final stop at the Frye Art Museum.

Borrowing signs and symbols from Stuart Davis’ street jazz, Kilgallen filtered them through Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson‘s  hopped-up, skinny-legged figures of The Hairy Who, a Chicago group that Nutt and Nilsson transplanted to Northern California in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Nutt was teaching at UC Davis.

Getting a good reception from Bay Area Funk and Dude Ranch Dada practitioners who were also on the faculty, Nutt’s and Nilsson’s impact rippled up the coast to Seattle and down to San Francisco and was still percolating when Kilgallen (and McGee) came of age in the 1980s.

Main Street is her monument. Full of scale-shifts, fractured street advertising and sad sacks caught in colored light as if the day loved them, it records the ordinary raised to  gut-bucket sanctity.

Kilgallen:

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.