Tagging
Barry McGee
Filmed in 2012, this Exclusive follows artist Barry McGee through his self-titled retrospective exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA). McGee, who became interested in tagging while growing up in San Francisco, describes the excitement of putting up new tags and the rush of getting away with it.
Alongside his ongoing and intimate involvement with street culture, McGee has maintained an active studio practice, which he describes as being something “completely different.” These two disparate ways of making—and showing—work meet in Barry McGee, which was also shown at the ICA Boston.
Featured artists
About the artists
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.
