A Ghost in the Family

It was 1999, and Rojas was newly graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, when she first saw the work of the painter Margaret Kilgallen, who was thirty-one. It was at Deitch Projects, in SoHo. For the exhibit, a solo show called “To Friend + Foe,” Kilgallen had painted freehand on the gallery walls, in a flat, folk-art style, a pair of enormous brawling women, one wielding a broken bottle, the other with her fists up. At the time, Rojas was painting miniature dark-hearted fairy tales—girls in the woods with fierce animals—and, like many young painters, she was struck by the scale of Kilgallen’s work. “I was, like, ‘Who is this?’ ” Rojas told me. “There were not many women artists out there being outspoken and loud and big and feminine. I remember saying, ‘I want to see big women everywhere now!’ ” Rojas was living in a small apartment in Philadelphia, folding clothes at Banana Republic and working as a secretary to pay off student loans, painting her miniatures when she got home, tired out, at night. She couldn’t wait to make big paintings of her own.

Kilgallen, a book conservator at the San Francisco Public Library, drew upon old typography, hand-lettered signs, and the gritty urban environment of the Mission, where she lived and worked, to evoke a wistful, rough-edged West Coast landscape. She used leftover latex house paint in vintage circus-poster colors like blood red, ochre, and bird’s-egg blue-green, and, when she wasn’t painting straight on the wall, worked on found wood. She represented women as stoic, defiant, and usually alone—surfing, smoking, crying, cooking, playing the banjo. She admired physical endurance and courage. One of her icons was Fanny Durack, a pioneering swimmer who won a gold medal at the 1912 Olympics. Her word paintings, playful and fatalistic, provided a melancholy undertow to the bravado: “Windsome Lose Some,” “Woe Begone,” “So Long Lief.”

In her work, Kilgallen dropped arcane hints about herself. “To Friend + Foe” included a painting of two surfers, female and male, holding hands; a month before the opening, Kilgallen had used the image on the invitation to her wedding, to Barry McGee, in the hills overlooking San Francisco’s Linda Mar Beach, where the couple surfed together. McGee, who is Chinese and Irish, grew up in South San Francisco, where his father worked at an auto-body shop, and started writing graffiti under the name Twist when he was a teen-ager. Even now that he is nearly fifty, and has shown at the Venice Biennale and at the Carnegie International, crowds of teen-agers show up at his openings to have him sign their skateboards.

Among the artists associated with the Mission School—a loose group working in San Francisco in the nineties who shared an affinity for old wood, streetscapes, and anything raw or unschooled—Kilgallen and McGee were the most visible and the most admired. “They were the king and queen,” Ann Philbin, the director of the Hammer Museum, in Los Angeles, says. “They were the opposite of putting themselves forward in that kind of way, but everyone understood that they were such exceptional artists and so supremely talented, and, by the way, so beautiful.”

Five feet ten and slender, Kilgallen was intrepid, stubborn, and mischievous, a winsome tomboy with curly reddish-brown hair that she often pulled back in a clip at her temple. She was stylish and insouciant; she shoplifted lingerie from Goodwill and wore an orange ribbon tied around her neck. When I asked McGee the color of her eyes, he wrote, “Margaret’s eyes were blue as can be.” He was also tall and slim, with boyish dark hair that flopped into his eyes. Where Kilgallen was direct, McGee was subtle and evasive. Each was the other’s first love. “In social situations, Barry let Margaret do the talking,” Jeffrey Deitch, who founded Deitch Projects, says. “He’d be shuffling around shyly.” Cheryl Dunn, a filmmaker who spent time with Kilgallen and McGee, remembers her saying that if she didn’t tell him to have a sandwich he’d forget to eat.

In the studio they shared, Kilgallen and McGee worked side by side. He showed her how to make her own panels, and she brought home from the library the yellowing endpapers of old books, which they started painting on. She worked on her women; he painted and repainted the sad, sagging faces of the outcast men he saw around the city. They worked obsessively, perfecting their lettering, their cursives, and their lines. “Barry is busy downstairs making stickers,” Kilgallen wrote to a friend. “I hear the squeak of his pen—chisel tipped permanent black—I have been drawing pretty much every day, mostly, silly things; and when I feel brave I have been trying to teach myself how to paint.” When he needed an idea, he’d go over to her space and lift one. Deitch likens them to Picasso and Braque. From a distance, Rojas, too, idealized them. “That was a perfect union, Barry and Margaret,” she says. “You couldn’t get more parallel than the feminine and the masculine communing together.”

As recognition of Kilgallen’s and McGee’s work grew, they tried to retain the ephemeral, pure quality of paintings made on the street. Little pieces they recycled or reworked, sold for a pittance, or let be stolen from the galleries. Wall paintings were whited out when shows closed. When Kilgallen became fascinated by hobo culture, she and McGee started travelling up and down the West Coast to tag train cars with their secret nicknames: B. Vernon, after one of McGee’s uncles, and Matokie Slaughter, a nineteen-forties banjo player Kilgallen revered. The cars marked “B.V. + M.S.” are still out there.

Rojas, too, had an alternate identity: Peggy Honeywell, a lonesome Loretta Lynn-like country singer who sang her heart out at open mikes around Philadelphia. Rojas is short and strong, half Peruvian, from Ohio, with nape-length dark hair and a smattering of freckles across her nose. As Peggy Honeywell, she wore a long wig and flouncy calico dresses, and sometimes, because she was shy, a paper bag over her head. Her boyfriend at the time, an artist named Andrew Jeffrey Wright, idolized McGee; he and his guy friends called McGee and his graffiti contemporaries the Big Kids. Smitten by Kilgallen’s work, Rojas started sending her and McGee cassette tapes of Peggy Honeywell, recorded with a four-track in her bedroom, and decorated with covers she had silk-screened.

The songs Rojas wrote were naïve and stripped down, just a guitar and her voice. “Can’t seem to paint good pictures / you want good pictures don’t listen to my words / But my paintings are pretty to look at / can’t find a rhythm of my own so I listen carefully to yours and probably will steal it.” Kilgallen, who was, like many of her subjects, a banjo player, loved homespun music. She and McGee started listening to the Peggy Honeywell tapes incessantly. “It was like a soundtrack for us,” McGee said. “Whenever we’d go on a drive, we’d play those tapes.” They began a correspondence with Rojas, encouraging her music and her painting, and Rojas sent more tapes.

It was more than a year before Kilgallen and Rojas met properly, in May, 2001, installing “East Meets West”—three West Coast artists and their East Coast counterparts—at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. For Rojas, the exhibition was a milestone: it was her first museum show and it placed her in a context with an artist that to some extent she’d been modelling herself on. “Clare was sort of in awe of Margaret—that’s how it all started,” Alex Baker, who curated the show, told me. Rojas, who was by then finishing her first year of graduate school, at the Art Institute of Chicago, had introduced him to Kilgallen’s work. Baker says that the admiration went both ways; Kilgallen was astounded by how psychologically complex and refined Rojas’s paintings were. “She said, ‘I could never make work like this! It’s beyond my abilities.’ ”

Kilgallen had regular follow-up visits, and every time was given a clean bill of health. She got pregnant, and around the same time started a new sketchbook. She filled its pages with baby names: Piper, Mojave, Biancha, Clare. McGee says that they were happy and busy and didn’t think about the cancer, but the sketchbook betrays a creeping awareness of her illness. Always alert to language, Kilgallen began compiling ominous word lists: “smother,” “black out,” “keep dark,” “far away,” “underground,” “underneath.”

Two days before leaving for Philadelphia to work on her “East Meets West” installation, the most ambitious of her career, Kilgallen felt a tender lump below her diaphragm. At an appointment with a midwife, she promised to have it checked upon her return, a few weeks later. Like one of her heroines, she was determined to see her job through—the installation and the pregnancy. “Blind bargain,” she wrote in her sketchbook.

When Kilgallen got back to San Francisco, McGee was still in Europe, scheduled to return before the baby’s expected arrival, in late July. Alone, she learned that the cancer had metastasized to her liver; that tender, palpable mass was an organ seventy-five per cent overtaken by disease. Still, she held off telling her husband and her mother. When Kilgallen arrived at the hospital, she was jaundiced and extremely weak. “She was one of the sickest women I’ve ever met,” a nurse who examined her told me. “You looked in her eyes—she knew. But she flat out wasn’t going to talk about it.” Her only concern was for the pregnancy.

On June 7th, Kilgallen gave birth to a healthy baby, six weeks premature. She and McGee named her Asha, Sanskrit for “hope.” He arrived from Europe the next day, as Kilgallen was moved down to Oncology for aggressive chemotherapy. She stayed for two weeks, before being transferred to intensive care and, ultimately, to hospice, where she would open her eyes only to see Asha. “I’m going to get better,” she said, as her organs were failing. On June 26th, with her husband and her daughter at her side, she died.

During this time, McGee travelled constantly, Asha in tow, tending to two increasingly demanding careers—his and Kilgallen’s. For a show in Athens, and again for the Whitney Biennial in 2002, he re-created Kilgallen’s wall paintings, studiously embodying her hand. In his own installations, he started to include makeshift shacks of recycled wood, which he filled with her paintings. He wanted to be close to them, as a source and as a solace. “I didn’t know what else to do,” he said. “That whole time is just a wash of ‘Is this the right thing to honor her work?’ ”

McGee knew he couldn’t raise a child alone, nor could he live with a crowd of well-meaning family and friends. “I needed help,” he told me. “I needed to feel good again. I needed it fast. It was really scary.” Rojas was funny and fierce and steady. That winter, on the way back to San Francisco from New York, McGee stumbled around Chicago in a blizzard, with a cooler full of breast milk and a baby strapped to his chest, trying to find her student apartment. In the spring, he enlisted her to come to Milan, where he was installing a show at the Prada Foundation. Her roommate warned her to be careful, but Rojas would not be deterred. Scattered as McGee was, he represented a kind of freedom. “He was showing me the world,” she told me.

Just before Asha turned one, Rojas finished graduate school and moved in with McGee. When she got to San Francisco, she’d still barely been alone with him. They started taking road trips, heading north, escaping the families to see if they could be one. She was twenty-five, in love, and at his mercy. “We were in his car—with a baby,” she said. “I had no idea where we were going. He wouldn’t tell me.” In little towns that Rojas later learned he’d visited with Kilgallen, he would head for the train yard, pop Asha in the Baby Bjorn, and get out to write “Matokie Lives” on a freight car. It enraged Rojas; she didn’t think graffiti was an appropriate activity for an infant. She says, “There was nothing I could do but sit there and be the lookout, and watch him write Margaret’s name.”

In time, Rojas’s sensibility changed. The figures of women that had been present in her work since her student days were joined by men, often naked and in postures of submission. The paintings got angry, to the point that Rojas didn’t want to make them anymore. She stopped painting altogether, and for two years she only wrote. Afterward, she got her own studio, out of the Mission, in Dogpatch. “I don’t even have the key to Barry’s studio—that’s how interested I am in ever going there,” she told me. Most of her work now is abstract.

Rojas’s studio is huge, airy, and light, suitable for the oils that have become her preferred medium. When I visited in June, she was pushing to finish nine canvases for an art fair in the fall. She opened the door wearing a paint-dabbed denim apron and a pair of white-on-black Adidas. The paintings were big, four by five feet, in black, cream, red, and cerulean—like flattened Calder stabiles. “It’s all about harmony, balance, and finding joy through compositions,” she said. Her old paintings had geometric elements in the background. To make these new ones, she simply excised the figures. “It was about letting go of the story,” she says.

She took off her apron and sat down on a couch in a front room. She told me that she had recently taken a motorcycle-safety course, so she can ride a Vespa around Marin County on the weekends, and eventually use it in the city, to go from home to the studio. At the school, there was an obstacle course made out of cones. “One of the main things they teach you, going in and out, is not to fixate on the object in front of you, always to go straight ahead,” she said. “I fixated on the thing in front of me for a really long time.”

Rojas is thirty-nine and has been with McGee for fourteen years. In that time, his work has changed, too, showing signs of her influence. She teases him that it’s stealing; he agrees. “I let Clare work through things for years, and then I scoop it in,” he says. For the first time, in the fall, they collaborated on a show, in Rome. Their collaboration was not the side-by-side, kindred-spirits way of Kilgallen and McGee but something distinct: she would start a piece and leave the gallery; alone, he’d finish it. Then he would start something and she would finish it. Her lines were hard; his were soft. It was like checkers; they were equals, and it was fun.

McGee still starts many of his mornings in the freezing-cold ocean, beneath the hills where he and Kilgallen were married. He drives a white Chevy Astro van loaded with longboards, stickers, wax, and zines. Rojas told me that either he had never mourned for Kilgallen or he is mourning still. She never knew; she’d fall asleep listening to the sound of his chisel-tipped black pen and wonder what he was working out. Surfing, for him, is like drawing, or like grief—repeat, repeat, squeak, squeak, squeak. In the water, he is graceful, stoop-shouldered, cross-stepping toward the nose of his board, crouching down and disappearing into the froth. He can go on like that for hours.

One morning after surfing, McGee put on a red hooded windbreaker and brown pants, and drove the van to Menlo Park to see a piece of his that had been installed in the sprawling new Frank Gehry building at Facebook. He shuffled past employees eating scrambled eggs from Styrofoam clamshells to arrive at his “boil,” an optical hoard, bulging out from a wall, made from hundreds of odd-shaped thrift-store frames containing drawings, paintings, graffiti photographs, doodles done on napkins by his dad. “It’s about abundance,” McGee said. “Just more. More everything.”

On the way back to the city, McGee stopped in South San Francisco, at his brother Mike’s auto-body shop. Mike has thousands of pedals, fenders, and pieces of trim that fit old muscle cars; boxes full of Fisher-Price toys; vintage beer cans bought at swap meets; and most of the things Barry has tried to get rid of over the years, including all the visitor’s passes that Mike amassed when Kilgallen was in the hospital. They sit on a shelf, along with stickers she made, skateboards she designed, and posters for her shows.

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