There's a moment in Bay Area art history when the dean of SFAI sent an angry letter to a young graffiti artist, claiming her campus work "looks like shit"—that artist was Alicia McCarthy, and she kept making it anyway. Born in Oakland in 1969, McCarthy became a key figure in Bay art history, transforming punk messages into geometric poetry, weaving bright lines across found wood with house paint and devotion. Here, her signature weaves pulse with internal energy—colors mixed fresh for each application, lines that refuse to stay still, abstraction born from the streets and baptized in California light.