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.

About the Author

Barry McGee (born 1966) began exhibiting his work in the 1980s—not in a museum or gallery setting but on the streets of San Francisco. In the early 90s he was closely associated with the Mission School and the San Francisco Bay Area's graffiti boom. In 2001 his work was included in the Venice Biennale.