Alicia McCarthy is an American painter. She is a member of San Francisco's Mission School art movement. Her work is considered to have Naïve or Folk character, and often uses unconventional media like housepaint, graphite, or other found materials. "The Mission School" was composed of five artists all born in the late 1960s and living and working in the 1990s in San Francisco's Mission District when it was still a low-rent neighbourhood. The artists bonded over punk music, skateboarding, graffiti, queer politics and zine publishing âand they shared an appreciation for funky cartooning, offbeat social satire, quirky abstraction, folk art and old-fashioned graphic styles. Combining craft/folk art and urban street and graffiti culture, Alicia McCarthy and this Mission School group of artists, cultivated an art style that prized the handmade in an increasingly technologized society. McCarthy's art featured punk messages transformed into poetic and geometric forms.
