Alicia McCarthy The Weaves That Bind Us

This year, as we celebrate our 25th anniversary, Juxtapoz is honored to sit down and talk with a Bay Area artist who represented the scene surrounding the magazine when it was founded.

- Interview by Sasha Bogojev Portrait by Delon Isaacs

Back in the 1990s, San Francisco was the mecca for skateboarding kids around the world, but also a vibrant underground art hub, spreading a colorful, contagious vibe around the world through zines, music and occasional features in print. The immediacy of the burgeoning scene connected with other rebellious youth cultures, creating a unique language of punks, surfers, and graffiti outlaws hanging out in the Mission that marked and influenced generations way beyond the Bay Area. Certainly among those artists is Alicia McCarthy, whose work fuses the honest energy of the scene. Folk, graffiti, punk, and abstraction all weave into a labyrinth of loose lines, unexpected visuals and spontaneous personal marks, and the legacy of the Mission School remains a model for many emerging creatives.

Meeting Alicia at the opening of her solo show with Copenhagen’s V1 Gallery back in 2018 and having the opportunity to huddle together at the opening of her debut solo show with Brussels’ Alice Gallery earlier in 2019 was like being granted access to a documentarian of that time and place. While I had a massive appreciation for her work for the reasons cited, as well as our mutual interests, this conversation revealed a whole new dimension of meanings behind her captivating colorful weaves.

Sasha Bogojev: With Juxtapoz having its 25th anniversary this year, my idea for this interview was to connect that with the early days of The Mission School... Alicia McCarthy: What’s that?

How do you feel about that term? How I feel about the term is that it stems more back to when Glen Helfand originally wrote the article. So really, it’s him and his take on what he observed in the ‘90s. For me, it was my life. It felt special, but it didn’t feel like we were doing something.