Barry McGee

born 1966 in San Francisco, California, USA
lives and works in San Francisco

Barry McGee, aka Twist, grew up in a multiracial working-class family in San Francisco. Everyone drew, especially his father, who made a living customising cars. McGee did his first tag in 1985, and got his name Twist from the title of a scooter magazine. He won a scholarship to the San Francisco Art Institute, graduating in painting and printmaking, and quickly jumped from decorating discos to showing in alternative spaces and then to creating installations at museums such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art in Los Angeles and in galleries in downtown Soho and beyond. It was a non-profit gallery called The Luggage Store that first asked him to do something indoors, and other opportunities spread from there. But he did work as a printer in a letterpress shop as a back-up plan.

One significant fellowship award took McGee to Brazil where he noted that artworks displayed in churches were presented in a cluster. He absorbed this kind of display in his subsequent work. In 2001, his work featured in the Venice Biennale. In 2006, he courted controversy with a design he did for Adidas. McGee painted his Ray Fong caricature of an Asian boy on a limited-edition sneaker; some Asian-American groups thought this racist and the hullabaloo hit the international media. A mass email pointed out that McGee was half-Chinese American, and the image depicted the artist as a young boy. McGee remained silent as he rarely grants interviews.

Unlike New York, where so much of graffiti was kickstarted, San Francisco is a quieter place to make art – as it has been since the days of the beat poets – allowing McGee to move more easily from street-low to the white-cube-high and back again.  While achieving success in the established art scene and selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars, McGee continues to paint his primitivistic cartoons of down-and-outs on buildings and trains as well as canvases.

The street artist, though illegal, gathers ‘respect’ along the grapevine, rather than through the channels of PR and marketing that operate in the commercial art world, and though Twist rarely gets painted over by other artists, the work can get buffed over by squads of city cleaners. He has been caught and has done eight hours of community time cleaning up New York parks.

Now that his signature face is hip, he’s stopped drawing it on the street. ‘I'm back to straight tagging,’ he explains. ‘It gets the job done and it always aggravates. I'm interested in that’ (Andrew Jeffrey Wright, ‘Barry McGee; TWIST’ in Swindle, no 14, 2007).

Read more about Barry McGee’s 2004 Kaldor project.

See also
Barry McGee, Deitch Projects
Barry McGee, Gallery Paule Anglim