Barry McGee

Barry McGee (born 1966) is an artist who takes uncertainty and unpredictability as his guiding principles. Every exhibition is different. His installations have featured everything from robotic graffiti writers to entire shipping containers and automobiles, with drawings, sculptures, paintings and found objects roaming freely across the walls, floors and ceilings of exhibition spaces.

A native of San Francisco, McGee studied painting and printmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute, graduating in 1991. But he also made a name for himself as a graffiti artist, tagging the streets of San Francisco as Ray Fong, Twist and Twisto. He became a leading figure in the 1990s movement known as the Mission School, after the city's celebrated Mission District, and his work continues to bear the marks of that moment--the influence of urban, vernacular art forms, the use of nontraditional art materials and a taste for showing work with and among friends.

In this new volume, McGee has assembled hundreds of artworks and objects--his own works and the works of friends and acquaintances. Featuring new paintings, sculptures, photographs and images of site-specific installations, this new volume is an appropriately wide-ranging exploration of the recent work of an artist who defies easy categorization and explanation.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Barry McGee, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, August 24-December 9, 2012, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, March 1-May 19th, 2013.
As a teen in the eighties, Barry McGee practiced the outlaw art of graffiti in San Francisco's public spaces; these days, he routinely gets invited to make his mark on museum walls..."His cluster aesthetic," says [University of California's Berkeley Art Museum's] director, Lawrence Rinder, "echoes the experience of the street...he really captures that cacophony of an inner-city American landscape."--Hilarie Sheets "W Magazine "
Two decades of the graffiti artist's genre-defying work are collected in all their art-for-all glory.--Ryan Porter "Flare Magazine "