McCleary Gallagher is a sculptor, painter, and electrical engineer based in College Park, Maryland. Gallagher’s art practice helps him grapple with one of the messiest applications of empathy: finding points of contact between personal lived experiences and systemic or collective-scale experiences. Through his work, he creates space to explore tensions between internal and external identity, individuality and community, and individual agency and institutional authority. Both his sculpture and painting practices emphasize expressive markmaking to weave raw, evocative narratives and to access abstract, sub-verbal anxieties.
Gallagher has a BS in Electrical Engineering and is completing his BA in Studio Art. Before university, Gallagher was a crafter, independently building electric guitars by 13. He started sculpting in 2022 and first learned to paint in 2023.
His work first showed at UMD’s 2025 Sadat Arts for Justice and Peace exhibition. Since then, he’s shown in Sandy Spring, Glen Echo, Rockville, and College Park, MD.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

My art practice helps me to grapple with one of the most challenging applications of empathy: finding connections between my personal lived experience and communal experiences. For one, how can I identify with the impact of systemic racism on millions of people I will never meet?
My practice splits between acrylic painting and mixed-media wood and steel sculpture. In painting, I use symbolic imagery, textured collage, and frenetic, painterly brushstrokes to materialize overwhelming emotions grounded in specific topics. To my sculpture, I bring a similar ethos of raw, energetic expression through strenuous techniques ranging from hand-forging and twisting to drawknife carving and joinery. In my artworks, the process of fabrication itself is a critical vehicle for communication.
Visually, I draw inspiration from Tony Smith and other minimalist sculptors - I like to think of my faceted wood forms as angsty perversions of Smith’s geometric pieces. Although I hate futurist philosophy and everything it stands for (it’s propaganda), I am visually inspired by the works of painters such as Boccioni, who capture movement through strong color contrast and dense webs of energetic lines and volumes. Conceptually, I am inspired by the works of Camus and absurdist philosophy. Their rejection of monolithic political movements and the elevation of individual moral agency inform much of my art’s conceptual approach. I adore the works of Louise Bourgeois - she models a form of activist art that leverages her personal experience as a medium for protest. Her work provides a language for protest art that feels approachable.