On the occasion of Old Mystified, Barry McGee’s first solo exhibition with Berggruen Gallery in 27 years, the artist sat down with Berggruen Gallery’s Editorial Associate Mary Kate Tankard to discuss making art in San Francisco, his love for found objects, and some of his early artistic inspirations.
Interview was edited for length and clarity.
Berggruen Gallery: You are well known for being a large figure to come out of the Mission School in the 90s and early 2000s. You have connections to the underground, gallery, and non-profit arts scene as well as the skating, surfing, and organizing scene in the Bay Area. San Francisco has been called, your main source of inspiration. Would you agree with that?
Barry McGee: I like all those things. There’s something about the city that's good, though, because it's a little bit, it's not Los Angeles, and it's not New York, and it doesn't have that pressure and that spotlight on it, which I like a lot. It feels freer. New York is so competitive with galleries and other painters, but here it feels more laid-back which I like. There are tons of things that still inspire me here. On the way here, I took a photo for my assistant to go pick up a table that was sitting on the street. There's just stuff around here that works.
BG: Did you always know that San Francisco was going to be a place that you would stay and feel so energetically and creatively moved by? Did you feel this way when you were younger and making art?
BM: I've lived in a lot of other places, but I've always come back here because it feels the most correct for me. Even when we were kids, we were the same. We used to just dig holes. We used to dig these giant holes and put our bikes in them, find sofas, and put down pieces of plywood that we'd sit on top of, and just sit in the earth. I don't know how we dug holes that big. We’d just ride our BMX bikes, and we'd always have our shovels nearby. We tried to make little dirt ramps and stuff for us to jump on. We’d always start with a big hole and then just find chairs, whatever is lying around, and put them in the hole. I feel like I'm almost doing something similar. I like just finding a nice place or location that's not overrun with people, and you can just kind of do things there. Meet friends here or bike there, things that still feel special, like that sense of discovery a little bit. It feels diverse here also. I’ve always felt comfortable with that. I had Fijian, Samoan, and Hispanic friends. Once you have that kind of thing established early on it frees up your mind for so many other things. In the 70’s it was very diverse already. So, it was a cool way to learn about other cultures. Through your friends and their parents and how they got here. That just continued through high school and then college. I had Burmese friends that were on refugee programs. So, without having to go anywhere I learned a lot. Just being in the Bay Area I learned about different cultures, lifestyles, and art. I always gravitated towards people that were involved with music, and arts already, from an early age.
BG: Something that is often commented on is the sense of adventurism, playfulness, and humor in your work while still evoking emotionality, and calling attention to outsider communities. How do you balance making things that have levity while maintaining some of the political and community-organizing messaging that is so central to your ideology as an artist?
BM: I feel very fortunate to have grown up in a city with very strong counter-cultural values and to protest when things are unjust. Many activist organizations were highly visible in the city and Bay Area when I was at a young impressionable age. The Reagan/Bush eras of our meddling in Central American politics through violence and dictatorships in Nicaragua and El Salvador, that period in San Francisco opened my eyes to how our government can subvert narratives and our belief systems to exploit entire nations to feed the capitalist expansionist vision. It was spelled out plainly in spray paint on corporate buildings in the financial district often in large, red lettering. The music and kids I surrounded myself with also backed up our understanding of injustice here and abroad in punk rock venues and often outside of them. Survival research laboratories could be found under freeway underpasses with their machinery and political activism most weekends in a freeform anarchist approach. I learned and gravitated toward this amazing freeform moment of time in San Francisco. I’ve always hoped to build upon it and inspire with my own work somehow.
BG: You incorporate a lot of found objects into your work and your large installations. For this exhibition, some of the pieces come from tables you found on the street and repurposed. One curator said, “Barry can turn trash into anything beautiful.” I’ve also heard you say you’ll walk by trash and feel inspired. Can you talk more about how collecting from your environment shapes your practice?
BM: There is such amazing trash everywhere in San Francisco! It brings me so much joy riding my bike and gazing at piles of trash and taking pictures. My phone often makes videos with celebratory music of the images of trash. I want to never enter an art store in my perfect world. It all exists out in the world blowing around in the wind or piled up in an illegally dumped site. Often if no one can find me, I tell my friends to look in a dumpster.
BG: You have a distinctive style, with folk lettering, and geometric abstraction. I read that some of this was shaped by comic collecting as a young kid. Who were some of the artists and visuals that shaped you most as you were coming of age as an artist?
BM: My brother and I collected comic books when we were young, and I had many feeble attempts trying to make comics back then. I was always studying the different lines and weights of lines in comics at that age. Someone like Robert Crumb’s line I knew about before Philip Guston’s. It was a hole in a fence which I climbed through.
BG: When did you start drawing and painting, and when did you know it would be your life’s work?
BM: I’ve always drawn and painted since failing miserably in math and economy classes in middle school. I would draw all over my homework. Somehow the teachers passed me each year. I’m still hoping both mediums become my life’s work. It’s difficult to know if I have made a difference.
BG: For many years you were tagging around the city as a graffiti artist, but you also studied printmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute. Before that, you worked at a letterpress shop on 3rd and Townsend where you learned printmaking working on midcentury presses. Can you talk a bit about your connection with printmaking as a medium?
BM: I loved printmaking and the ability to reproduce an image on mid-century presses. It was also the easiest path for the coveted scholarship and grants at the San Francisco Art Institute back then since the painting departments were flooded with hopeful young artists clamoring over one another for the same grants with much more competition. At that time, it was a backwater department at SFAI, so I really took advantage of the 24-hour access and lack of supervision. On the bike rides home from school, at two in the morning, I would go tagging. It was such a lovely time. To be shown with Bridget Riley in the same building is really a dream for me!
BG: The colors you work with are so recognizable and seem to be consistent spanning a lot of your older work. Are there any landscapes or cityscapes that more recently have been shaping your color palate?
BM: I have gravitated toward brighter more urgent colors in the last decade or so as it felt like the right thing to do for me. I still have longings for some things made with just one or two colors for the graphics and simplicity of how it can communicate easily to a wider audience. I like things that take seconds to execute and things that take months.
BG: You are well known as well for your installation process and it seems that you are very intentional and affected by the environment you show your work in. How do you feel this gallery will affect this exhibition?
BM: I was fortunate enough to tour John’s newer location when it was being retrofitted. We all wore hard hats as Gretchen led us through the building and marveled at the steel-reinforced interior. It is exciting to think about installing it in this beautiful art center!
BG: You’re often said to be a city artist, but it seems that you’re inspired by the healing powers of nature as well. Is this something that’s come about later for you in your life and work or was it always a part of your inspiration and connection the California?
BM: I feel very grateful for growing up in an area of such immense beauty with nature at your fingertips. To sit in the ocean and look at it all from that vantage point has inspired me infinitely. Also, to that point, a giant pile of trash dumped on my street corner at three in the morning can bring that same introspective inspiring feeling.
BG: You have historically been known to be uncomfortable doing solo shows, but it seems like none of your work is ever really a solo show because you’re always in community with other artists. One curator said, “Sometimes even if it’s not explicit, Barry’s history, his influences, his friends, and his family, everything is present in his installations. You might not be able to put a finger on it but it's present.” In what ways are you drawing on the histories or works of others in this show?
BM: I feel like I have been fortunate to do many exhibitions and recently more excited about sharing younger, more exciting artists within the exhibitions. The Bay Area is so robust with so many young diverse artists right now. It would be a crying shame not to include their energy. There is so much I want to share that often I get overwhelmed. Also, the best shows I’ve seen in my life have always been in a group show format with all the different ideas and emotions sharing the space. A solo show is an exercise in ego and privilege, two things I abhor.
BG: You did your first solo exhibition at Berggruen 27 years ago. Since then, you’ve done solo and group exhibitions all over the world. How does it feel to be doing an exhibition downtown with Berggruen in San Francisco again? Does it feel like a return of sorts?
BM: It’s an absolute honor to have this opportunity to work with John and the incredible staff he has assembled here at this moment in time. John and I have flirted for many years, so it feels honest and real, something that is very important to me.
BG: What is your favorite piece in the exhibition?
BM: The tables I found a block away from Berggruen Gallery in a shuttered Chinese restaurant excite me right now as does the idea of a Community Centre inside the gallery also. I like not knowing what is going to happen the most of all.
Barry McGee (b. San Francisco, 1966) McGee learned printmaking at a letterpress shop on 3rd and Townsend while completing a Bachelor of Fine Art in Painting & Printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1991. He was the recipient of the SECA Art Award San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and was featured in the Documentary Beautiful Losers. McGee’s first solo exhibition with Berggruen Gallery was in 1997 marking this show a 27-year homecoming. Since then he has become an internationally acclaimed artist, showing at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, The Watari-um Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, The Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Museo de la Ciudad de México, Mexico City, Mexico, Lyon Biennale, Lyon, France, La Triennale di Milano, Italy, The Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark, Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, SFMOMA, and The UC Berkeley Museum of Art and Pacific Film Archive. In addition to galleries, and museums, his work can be seen on streets and trains all over the world.
Barry McGee: Old Mystified, September 27 – November 7, 2024. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and previews are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone at (415) 781-4629 or by email at info@berggruen.com.
