When Barry McGee drove his Chevy Astro van from his home in Marin County, Calif., to Los Angeles in October to install his exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch, he stopped in train yards along the way to write invented graffiti monikers on the sides of the freight cars with a white crayon.
McGee is an aficionado of this old-fashioned genre of graffiti. Since the 1800s, long before “wildstyle” throw-ups and spray-painted subway trains, itinerant men — tramps or hoboes, as they were called — have written their names or insignia on the boxcars they hopped all across this country.
McGee cut his teeth as a graffiti writer in San Francisco in the early 1980s under the pseudonym Twist. He then found success in the next decade showing paintings and drawings in galleries under his own name. Along with colorful paintings of tessellated grids and hand-lettered signs for fictional businesses, in his 20s, he began making pictures (both legally and on public walls) of older men with melting features and exhausted expressions: geezers, as he calls them.
McGee, now 60, has become one of street art’s elder statesmen, an influential and well-loved figure who has retained his credibility with a younger generation despite exhibiting in blue-chip galleries and doing corporate collaborations with brands like Meta, Adidas and Beats by Dre. In his packed exhibition, “Another Round,” which opened Oct. 30, alongside over 200 of his paintings, sculptures and photographs, he includes the work of scores of artists decades younger than himself and a few who are older.
On one of several recent video calls with the artist in the small hours (he’s a night owl), I asked if he identifies with the geezers he paints and with the train-hopping hoboes on whom many are based. “Unfortunately, yes I do,” he replied.
These days, McGee spends most of his time at his home in Bolinas, five minutes from the beach. He says he was tired of getting parking tickets and having to lock his doors in San Francisco: “I became an old person, is what happened.”
In a subculture defined by youth, McGee still holds sway. In February, in collaboration with The Hole gallery, he organized a pop-up exhibition in a 99-cent store on Wilshire Boulevard, a stone’s throw from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. It was a chaotic triumph; over 200 artists showed up with just a day or two of notice to cram their work onto the supermarket’s empty shelves. (They also graffitied most of its writable surfaces — and walls in the surrounding neighborhood, to the chagrin of residents.)
“99CENT” was a rude riposte to the Frieze Art Fair, which opened in Los Angeles a few days later. It satirized the commercial contemporary art world with creations of uneven virtuosity by diverse makers and dabblers, many of whom do not aspire to careers as professional artists. Nevertheless, most of it was for sale.
Graffiti, when McGee started out, was staunchly anticapitalist. But views have evolved, said Aaron Rose, a Los Angeles-based artist and writer who showed McGee’s work in the 1990s at The Alleged Gallery in New York. “In the late ’90s and even into the early aughts, Barry and most of the artists from that scene were reluctant to collaborate with brands,” he said. “But the world changed, and the whole idea of ‘no sellout’ kind of went out the window.”
One of the artists in “Another Round” is graffiti writer, designer and artist Chito, who has collaborated with brands including Adidas and Crocs. Chito, 30, told me that he admired how McGee maintained a separation between his work for the street, for galleries and for brands. “He never made his graffiti corny, because he’s always kept it real on both sides, you know?”
Others cite McGee’s willingness to use his success to elevate the artwork of others in his community. “99CENT” was a case in point; so, too, is “Another Round.”
“In graffiti,” McGee said, “if someone cuts a hole in the fence, everybody goes through that same hole. Just like, if I have an opportunity at Jeffrey Deitch’s space, everybody’s coming in with me.”
Deitch has witnessed McGee patiently signing books, T-shirts and skate decks for crowds of fans. “He’s like a Pied Piper,” the gallerist said. In one week, “99CENT” drew an estimated 25,000 visitors; Frieze, by comparison, counted 32,000.
“Another Round” continues a thread through McGee’s exhibitions since 2015, when he built his first “Healing Arts Center” in a former check-cashing business in San Francisco. Since then, he has created several such installations, which he fills with art and artifacts by his friends and peers.
“Art’s healed me,” McGee said. “It’s helped me as much as anything in my life.”
“I just wanted to feel good and have others feel good about art and coming together as a local community,” he added.
“99CENT,” McGee said, “was the biggest version of a healing.” He was struck by how it brought together people who might, in the territorial graffiti scene, have been “warring factions” because they were from different neighborhoods.
For “Another Round,” McGee worked with the artist Alexis Ross to create two mock storefronts in the gallery. One is a condensed refabrication of the 99-cent store, with the same linoleum floor and pegboard shelving, dressed with artwork from that show and some fresh additions. Adjacent is a bookshop that offers zines, obscure books, T-shirts and McGee’s favorite granola. It’s operated by Matthew James-Wilson of Heavy Manners Library, lending library, bookstore and event space in Echo Park.
The artist Henri Paul Broyard, 37, who participated in “99CENT,” contributed a maquette for a “Healing Arts Center” built from cardboard and an old paint palette. Broyard said he understood McGee’s healing arts concept as “both sincere and kind of tongue-in-cheek.”
In the wake of the collaborative “99CENT” exhibition — for which McGee insists he “was pretty hands-off” — his latest show hews closer to a loosely authored, collective model. As he toured me around the gallery by video, he seemed surprised to encounter objects — like two spray-painted tumbleweeds — that artists had simply left there.
The space was busy with visitors, many of whom greeted McGee. They wove around plinths topped with ceramics and his painted, papier-mâché sculptures; a custom motorbike that once belonged to Kenny Howard (better known as Von Dutch); and an ornate tricycle that McGee’s hot-rodder father had tricked out for him when he was a kid.
McGee’s ballpoint pen drawings of baleful faces, from early in his career, can be found further along. There’s plenty of new work too, including shaped abstract paintings and decorated plates.
It is hard not to notice that most of the artists in the exhibition — as in the broader graffiti scene — are male, although McGee says he is working on making the gender balance more equal in his shows.
“He has a crew of boys who help him do everything. They adore him,” said the artist Ruby Neri, an old friend of McGee’s associated with the Mission School group of San Francisco in the 1990s. Neri moved from graffiti to paintings and painted sculptures, often depicting ribald female nudes. Her deft early painting of two faces, on a scrap of plywood, features in the 99-cent-themed section of this show.
Other female artists, including McGee’s first wife Margaret Kilgallen, who died in 2001 at age 33, are included. There is a photograph of Kilgallen drawing on a boxcar, and a print by McGee and Kilgallen’s daughter, Asha, 25. A carbuncular gray sculpture, made from spray-painted pompoms, is by McGee’s current partner, Sorat May Andersen. As with “99CENT,” this exhibition seems less concerned with scrupulous aesthetic discernment than with generosity of spirit, with the warm embrace of friends and family.
During his visit, McGee was painting on walls all around Los Angeles, though he declined to reveal where. McGee is intent on leaving his mark on trains, on walls, on sneakers, on skate decks, on posters and in galleries throughout the world, sending signals, as he said, that he’s “alive and breathing.”
“I just have this urgency — I want to draw on something and have it outlast me, and let it sit in a field in Missouri or Utah,” he said of his train tags. To be influential, to encourage another generation of artists, is surely the ultimate way of leaving your mark.
Barry McGee: Another Round Through Jan. 30, 2027, Jeffrey Deitch, 7000 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles; 323-925-3000; [email protected].
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