Merry Gale McCall

Merry Gale McCall did not simply live. She bent life to her will, as she bent metal—relentlessly, with vision and force, until it became what it was meant to be. She was not a woman who walked through the world unnoticed, nor did she wish to be. She lived in defiance of the ordinary, with an eye for beauty in the unlikely places, in the twisted and the rough, in the weight of stone, in the stubbornness of steel.

Born in 1953, Gale knew that art was not about decoration. It was about reckoning—with materials, with time, with herself. She sculpted in metal, ceramic, and stone, coaxing them into forms that whispered stories only she could hear. Cities hold her fingerprints: Seattle, San Diego, Long Beach, Sacramento. The Inglewood Forum bears her mark—benches cast from concrete, waiting in quiet patience until darkness reveals their secret glow, a violet shimmer against the night. They do not beg to be seen. They simply endure, luminous and unyielding, like the woman who made them.

Her work was recognized in halls of prestige—MoMA PS1 counted her among its artists in 1987—but the accolades never mattered as much as the making. She lived in the labor, in the doing, in the wrestling of something raw into something worthy.

Gale did not live gently. She traveled, she tested herself, she sought the strange and the wondrous, refusing to be bound by comfort or convention. The world was not a place to be observed but devoured—on foot, on a bike at dawn, in the crisp bite of air on her skin. She moved through it with the same determination that she brought to her work, unafraid, unwilling to be anything but utterly alive.

But for all her ferocity, for all her will, Gale’s truest masterpiece was the love she forged with her people. Friendship, to her, was no light thing. It was a vow, a devotion, a labor as worthy as the bending of metal or the chiseling of stone. She held her friends close, not in passing, but with the grip of one who understood that life is brief and bonds must be made to last. And at the heart of it all was her gang—her chosen family, the ones who laughed with her, built with her, stood with her. They were hers, and she was theirs, in the way that only the rarest souls ever allow themselves to belong.

Her laughter was its own kind of sculpture, cut from air and light, impossible to forget. And her eyes—sharp, knowing, always searching for what lay beneath the surface—saw the world not just as it was, but as it could be.

Popcorn, music, NPR, coffee—these were not just pleasures, they were rituals, the small devotions that stitched a life together. And she was devoted, to beauty, to the unusual, to the great experiment of being here, for however long we are given.

Gale McCall did not go quietly, nor would we expect her to. Her art remains, her laughter lingers, and the shape of her presence, once known, cannot be unmade. We do not say goodbye. We carry her forward, as she would have wanted—head high, hands strong, eyes open to the wonder of it all. And we, her gang, will tell her story. Again and again. Until the telling itself is a kind of home.

Gale is survived by her brother, Terrence Mason McCall; her sister, Linda Taylor; and her nieces, Shannon McCall, Kelly McCall, and Brydie Burke. She is also survived by her nephew, KC Taylor; her great-niece, Taylor Burke; and her great-nephews, Jai McCall-Smith and Austin Burke.

Lastly, she leaves behind her most spectacularly sweet caregiving friends, David Aguirre and Martina Crouch, as well as JC the cat.

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