Barry McGee: Retrospective
Filmed in 2012, artist Barry McGee discusses the work of his friends, family and a younger generation of street artists that he included in his retrospective exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Though these artists are not as famous as McGee, their work is displayed with equal prominence.
This democratic approach to making and displaying art is a defining characteristic of McGee’s street and studio practices. McGee’s self-titled retrospective exhibition traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) Boston in 2013.
Credits
Producer: Ian Forster. Consulting Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Bob Elfstrom. Camera: Bob Elfstrom. Sound: Doug Dunderdale. Editor: Morgan Riles. Artwork Courtesy: Barry McGee. Special Thanks: UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Theme Music: Peter Foley.
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Barry McGee was born in 1966 in San Francisco, California, where he currently lives and works. He received his BFA in painting and printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1991. Taking inspiration from his upbringing in the Bay Area, folk and craft art, Mexican Muralists, geometric abstraction, and cartoons, McGee’s work balances the formal concerns of fine art with populist representations and communal modes of working. In doing so, he creates a body of work that combines the disparate worlds of street art and fine art. Through his drawings, paintings, and mixed-media installations, the artist creates a visual lexicon that addresses the struggles of contemporary urban life, looking toward his local community while building a world of his own characters, monikers, and motifs.
More on Barry McGee
Public and Private Space
Barry McGee talks about his interest in the history of graffiti, and how he approaches installing his graffiti-style paintings in a gallery space.
