Mixed Race Studies

Barry McGee

art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century
Public Broadcasting Service
Season 1 (2001), Place

About Barry McGee

A lauded and much-respected cult figure in a bi-coastal subculture that comprises skaters, graffiti artists, and West Coast surfers, Barry McGee was born in 1966 in California, where he continues to live and work. In 1991, he received a BFA in painting and printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute. His drawings, paintings, and mixed-media installations take their inspiration from contemporary urban culture, incorporating elements such as empty liquor bottles and spray-paint cans, tagged signs, wrenches, and scrap wood or metal. McGee is also a graffiti artist, working on the streets of America’s cities since the 1980s, where he is known by the tag name “Twist.” He views graffiti as a vital method of communication, one that keeps him in touch with a larger, more diverse audience than can be reached through the traditional spaces of a gallery or museum. His trademark icon, a male caricature with sagging eyes and a bemused expression, recalls the homeless people and transients who call the streets their home. McGee says, “Compelling art, to me, is a name carved into a tree.” His work has been shown at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and on streets and trains all over the United States. He and his daughter, Asha, live in San Francisco.

The Graffitist Who Moved Indoors

The New York Times
2013-03-28

Carol Kino

SAN FRANCISCO — “This is one of my favorite things to do,” Barry McGee said as he drove along the Bayshore Freeway on a glowering winter day, pointing out random patches of new graffiti. He was supposed to be talking about his traveling midcareer retrospective, which opens Saturday at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Instead, he was revisiting some of the places where he’d spent time in the late 1980s and early ’90s, as he rose to prominence as the graffiti artist known as Twist.

“That was the key, to have every rooftop in San Francisco,” Mr. McGee reminisced as he took an off-ramp down toward the industrial reaches of the Mission District, one of many places where he and his crew once tagged the road, safety barriers and every visible roof below. “It seems completely ridiculous now,” he said, laughing, “but then it was the most important thing.”

Since those days, the whole South of Market area, once known for its seediness, has been redeveloped, gentrified. Mr. McGee had to drive past several blocks of trendy loft buildings before finding a slice of ruined waterfront that resembled the streets he once roamed. He finally stopped at a crumbling warehouse by the bay…

…But perhaps the person with the biggest expectations is Mr. McGee himself.

He grew up in South San Francisco, the child of a Chinese-American secretary and an Irish-American father who worked in auto body shops and collected junked hot rods. As a teenager, he was fascinated by the anarchic tactics of the Bay Area’s activist groups, some of which were spray-painting anti-government slogans on banks and underpasses. (Unsurprisingly, one of his favorite words is “radical.”)

A friend introduced him to graffiti and Mr. McGee, who had “always drawn,” said his creative life took off. “It was really empowering,” he said. “I really thought I was doing art on the street.”…

Read the entire article here. View the slide show here.