Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to James Mccaffrey. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
James, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?
strike-slip boundaries occur where tectonic plates interact in a way that the earth’s crust is neither pulled apart nor destroyed. Instead, with a strike-slip fault line, two plates slide, or perhaps more accurately grind past each other creating seismic friction. The San Andreas Fault is major Fault line underlying the Bay Area and is a Strike-Slip. When I heard this sexy, powerfully alliterative //chic lil slice of geologist terminology, my first thought was “Wow it might be cool to have a gallery named after this tectonic phenomenon—as a parallel can certainly be seen to the way many artists use the underlying, unseen friction of the human condition in order to make an impact on the harsh realities of contemporary society—that is, we artists spend years slowly grinding and pushing back against the status quo of our contemporaries. As we move deeper into Strike-Slip’s gallery programming, 3 consecutive solo exhibitions (Kristen Wong, Momoko Schaffer, and Britt Henze.
Kristen’s solo show, ‘False Spring,’ opening on March 6th from 5-9pm, is frankly only the second solo exhibition our young gallery team has curated—and the first since June & July’ 2024 with Jun Yang in his SF solo exhibition debut (“Momgwa Egol”). It was an incredibly powerful body of work exploring personal and sexual identity, the trials and triumphs of being an immigrant artist facing the challenges and how his entire life’ approach revolves around art as a healing medium; as a process to discover what is required ofmany, long cold made it standout in my mind the most memorable was that we were able to deliver the goal of providing our roster with the ideal platform to support them making a brief but incredibly large impact with their work. Like an Earthquake, many years, or even a lifetime of subterranean tumult, has the potential to suddenly alter the fabric of human culture.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Strike-slip Gallery, founded by Jimmy McCaffrey, is a dynamic platform for storytelling through art. Since its inception, the gallery has hosted critically acclaimed exhibitions, including “ADYTON: Sacred Spaces in Abstraction” and “Momgwa Eolgul,” which explored themes of identity, resilience, and belonging. In its first year, Strike-slip attracted over 3,700 visitors to its Guerrero Street space, fostering meaningful connections between artists and audiences.
Rooted in a commitment to inclusivity and cultural dialogue, Strike-slip continues to empower underrepresented voices while inspiring empathy and understanding through transformative art experiences. The gallery is now poised to expand its impact across Downtown San Francisco with a a 20,000 Sq ft. full demolished vacant retail shell, obtained for free, on the basis of Strike-slip’s team delivering 6 months of unique activation programs in the space, looking to continue the growth/development of local brand awareness for the gallery, and in turn, to generate buzz and excitement around the long-vacant monolithic void created by a type of real estate which very few companies any longer have needs for. My goal is to hopefully continue our progress in providing local talent their first major solo exhibitions and beyond that, to be the defining catalyst that SF and Bay Area artists // art communities at large, associate our team and our gallery brand with the elevation of their respective careers, which they all deserve.
Jimmy McCaffrey (b.1991) is an abstract artist, curator and gallerist, residing and working in San Francisco’s Mission District; born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts.
McCaffrey’s distinct artistic language revolves around the concept of fragmentation and self-recomposition. This fragmentation is not a disintegration but a deliberate deconstruction, used to confront his emotional challenges, paving the way for a transformative restoration.
His work, entirely reflecting his inner world, is presented as a kaleidoscope of rhythmic applications scattered across the canvas, creating asymmetric but balanced compositions, achieving harmony through dissonance. Each layer in his work represents an emotional energy field, capturing unique moments , using paint and sculpture and poetic prose to crystallize their essence.
McCaffrey’s visual themes are inspired by many different types intriguing experiences, or even broad topics of intellectual interest that can be expressed through an artistic medium. Some of these themes include: origins of the universe and of humanity; stimulating nighttime scenery in the Bay Area/NYC; coral reefs; the power of ocean currents; tropical forests and unique geological formations, to name just a few.
Jimmy finds the most insight and fulfillment by candidly exploring the complexity of the human condition through the experimental components of his process, such as the interplay of layered paints, or the natural arrangements of accumulating discarded supplies.
Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?
Always look for the best qualities in the team members you have building your business with you. With any incremental successes as are going to be tons of hurdles and challenges and all the while, you are going to face a choice: “nurture one another’s various individual efforts like your well-being depends on it. Do it with verbal encouragement. Do it by being a good coworker that everyone can rely on to go all-in with effort, do it by recognizing your team’s various individual skill sets and strengths and let them know their biggest fear is also the root of their greatest superpower. It really shocks me every time when I see the impact of being deliberate around the efforts we put forth in observing our close companions over a longer horizon. Vocalize every victory, have an open dialogue that allows for creative chances to be taken without paralysis from fear of failure. Just for the love of God please get started. Even if it feels rushed or too early or whatever, you can’t advance your career as a gallerist and artist without the acknowledgment of our difficulties and different neurological approaches. It’s really important to lead from a place of power with a specific purpose as well. A team with no guidance I’ve learned the hard way multiple times, will always get slaughtered. that can fuel frustration and burnout
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
I’ve always kind of been an artist, but I never thought about creating the way I do now until I was in my late 20s.
I had a mental breakdown at the end of 2018 and at the time could not think of an even remotely rational path forward that involved a white collar job. And when I say rational, I mean a life where I was able to effectively manage and subdue recurrent, intense bouts of mania, with sometimes acute, intense depressive episodes. When you see photos of me during that time, it’s obvious that I was extremely unwell. I was bloated, resentful, aggressively pessimistic. I was completely addicted, to everything…I was sick.
At that point my mindset was that of a man who didn’t have anything to lose. I was 28 years old and had just been paid $114,000 for a deal we closed in December 2018. In turn, I just lived off for the next year. As was normally the case being a 1099-independent contractor, that year I was unable to save money for my estimated tax payments. For an entire year all I spent money on was: 1)books, as I wanted to at first, write fiction novels; 2) an ungodly amount of art supplies, nearly $27k, from Michael’s and Blick; 3) rental cars, for driving back and forth to Fall River, MA; 4) sports betting; 5) food; 6) rent; 7) tobacco; 8) beer. I got my pot for free. I had everything I needed to both numb myself and lose myself all at once. I became reclusive. The more time I spent tucked away in that barn, painting through the night, crashing every 72 hours for a dense 14-16 hour slumber. I called those “slumber dumps.”
From December 2018-February 2020 I was extremely manic—throw in 2 acute depressive episodes for short periods during that time and it was clear to many I was extremely unwell…I toggled back and forth between living at my apartment in Tribeca, where I would drink myself into an oblivion both with and without the company of friends, and my escape home, at my grandparents house in Fall River, MA, where I kept a chaotic studio in a barn at my grandparents house. My grandfather having nearly lost his mind in the throws of recovering from several bypass surgeries, had eccentrically commissioned my uncle, his son, to build a big red barn for his cars. It was hyperbolic in nature, the placement, the scale, the color, none of it looked right. For one it occupied a huge portion of the front yard, completely obscuring the view of their house—the barn was deep matte red and the house was dark green. The Christmas House. It was bizarre. But so was I. And that was exactly the temple that I so unknowingly needed to pull myself together. I painted in an unfinished loft upstairs above the garage portion. It was being used as well for storage of my uncle Joey’s belongings from his life post-divorce. I unintentionally covered so much of his shit in paint. I still feel awkward about that.
While I may have been sick over that roughly 18-month period from late 2018 to early 2029, I also read 94 books in 2019, including every Pulitzer Prize novel from 1972 through the present. Something about that year changed not just the way my critical mind thought, but even more so, how it felt. It seems to me in retrospect like a bonafide rewiring of my mind had taken place. In some respects it’s inevitable when ingesting that much quality creative literature, in such a short time frame, that it would permanently alter my perspective on the world. It frankly opened my heart up to an infinite number of NEW worlds, which have landed me where I am today.
I started painting what I think can be deemed serious abstract works at my grandparents house in the barn that was half finished, near Fall River, Massachusetts. In the autumn of 2019, as I was splitting my time between there and my apartment on Hudson street in Manhattan, I was at the tail end of maybe the roughest manic episode of my life from May through September on and off constantly melting down and recovering. I had a routine that basically entailed staying up all night every night, painting portraits of my friends, writing and reading in a cyclical routine—almost like circuit training class but for expressing myself. These session usually only ended when I became so utterly exhausted that I would fall into these little “micro sleeps,” where I’d gloss over and shutdown momentarily for about 30 seconds to a minute and awake completely unaware of the context of my last thought. While I was painting at my grandparents’ barn there was one good thing…I drank far less than I had in the city. That said I smoked a shit load, I couldn’t tolerate myself at that point without a chemical lobotomy.
By December of 2019 I had only been painting for around 8 or 9 months and less than 1 year removed from a pretty intense mental health crisis, with wide ranging repercussions. Yet, I had made at least enough headway to see the light. I could see myself forging a path forward in the arts for myself. I didn’t give a f*ck. For the first time in my entire life I decided to pull my guard down and admit that I needed help. I decided to reveal the extent of negative consequences and overall impact manic depression had on my life. The fact that I had an intuitive awakening so profound while developing a love for painting, told me that painting was part of my “right track.”
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.jimmymccaffreyart.art/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/j.mccaffreyart?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ%3D%3D&utm_source=qr
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimmy-McCaffrey-986544283
Image Credits
All taken by me