Artist Barry McGee in Town at MCASB

With an unprecedented 30 minute continuous waiting line to enter the super-packed Museum of Contemporary Art SB on the 3rd floor of the Paseo Nuevo mall, San Francisco born internationally renowned artist Barry McGee, [a.k.a. “Twist”] opened his exhibit there titled “Barry McGee: SB Mid Summer Intensive” on June 30, to the welcoming open arms of our town’s professional artists, musicians, the surf community, and tourists, literally hundreds came to see the artist whose work in both graffiti and commercial galleries draws its own contradictions.

Breathing new life into the gallery, his 700+ installed works drew themselves into a new work of art by simple matter of their groupings, a flow he precisely designed. The various genres he brought with him from San Francisco were acrylic and gouache on panel paintings, drawings, surf boards, stools, balls, lamps, and set videos grouped in threes, sculptures, found objects, home furnishings, and the like. His layout of the main gallery included a “wave wall” work of layered art; electric guitars with amps in a corner; a walled area with two adjoining rooms comprising a homey respite packed with paintings, photographs, letters, and personal mementos with a staged cozy living room and couch with reading lamps; and an existentialist “man-cave” with video screens, a James Dean-like motorcycle, and various music instruments that were played by anonymous “friends of the artist.”

The retro-house living room area resembled the Regan era, a likely nod to the Reagan Ranch Museum, which he wanted to include here; however, they do not loan art.

Although he began the massive installation last week, when we arrived for the VIP walk through, he was still unloading crates and installing art with 20 helper-friends, including – wait for it – legendary surfer and artist Herbie Fletcher. The San Francisco Ratio 3 Gallery owner and his artist rep, Chris Perez, apologetically led our small group back out of the museum to wait an hour with fingers crossed that Barry would be finished in time for the hard opening at 6 pm. The artist is known to have no prior install plan, as its process is where his amalgamation of large quantities of works become one work of intentional art. When the doors officially opened, he and his crew were gone, yet I did note them at the back entrance parking lot, quite exhausted and packing their vans.

Let me begin this review by stating the obvious: it will take more than this column affords to discuss in detail the hierarchy of the art with regard to the volume of works presented, their intricate subsections, and the time span of their creation, which at first blush looks 1999 to 2011. The works, all “untitled,” reflect his love of overstated bold graphics and coded text, bright and muted colors, found objects, multi-paneled clusters, torn wood canvas, robotic moving graffiti writers, a harbinger of trippy antiques, precise use of lighting, flowing large scale next to small-scale works and ultimately arranged like a hoarder who idolizes and finds comfort in the past.

His signature “tags” were happily there as well: the graphic word FONG in its various incarnations, and the hand-drawn caricatured male heads on phallic bottoms, mostly prickly intense, said to emerge from his interface with the homeless. Walking into the gallery, there is a wide view of the main room whose double high walls are filled top to floor with art, there are sculptures on half dozen pedestals and on the floor, and four wood with glass rectangular display cases mark the room’s center. To the right entrance is a red neon-light sculpture paired with a large-scale, red-toned painted accretion, bookended by the Bloom Projects Room filled with 70 years of hand-made surf boards by the artist’s friend, Reynolds Yater, literally a floor-to-ceiling stack of surf boards. To his credit, Barry transformed the gallery spaces into a miniature urban city, with walls of “graffiti-fied” art and mini-apartments offering slices of urban life. Take a breath and dive in.

Barry, born 1966 in San Francisco and educated at the S.F. Art Institute in painting and printmaking, started out doing graffiti as an expression of what he felt and saw around him, which varied from the works he studied at SFAI. Noted in his recent interview with Conceptual Fine Arts February 2018, he states, “I used to just do graffiti. I never felt that there was any art to it. I like the non-artfulness of it. It’s generally quite different than what you find with all of the trappings of the art world.” Perez shared that his artist would want viewers to know, “This exhibit is a celebration of the local community mixed with Barry’s original works, installed with a sensitivity to be immersed in the art and subject to the architecture of the gallery. Please come back many times to take it all in.”

Seen at the opening were artists Tom Pazdurka, Marco Pinter, Penelope Gottlieb, Kimberly Hahn with daughter Kiki, Mary Hebner, Nancy Gifford and Jill and Barry Kitnick; former Montecito Society columnist Gail Gelles with husband Harry, museum trustees Cindy and Andrew Bermant, Debby Peterson, Georgene Vairo, board president Jacquelyn Klein-Brown, and acting museum director Michael Porter.

Check the MCASB website and Facebook pages for upcoming artist talks, the Scooter for Peace popup shop, and the Spotify playlist that goes with the show.

411: Barry McGee exhibit through October 14
http://www.mcasantabarbara.org