On paper it is a solo exhibition. In practice, Barry McGee‘s Another Round at Jeffrey Deitch‘s gallery on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles is closer to a neighbourhood party that will last three months. The San Francisco artist, now 60, has invited work by roughly 200 artists into the space, and the show runs until 30 January.
A miniature store and a bookshop
Visitors find a closet-sized replica of a 99 Cents Only store, complete with the chain’s blue-and-white floor. It nods to the week in February when McGee took over a shuttered branch of the discount retailer on Wilshire Boulevard during L.A. Art Week, an event that drew around 25,000 people according to Deitch. Next to it, a makeshift “anarchist bookstore” run with Matthew James-Wilson of the Heavy Manners library in Echo Park will host workshops in French beading and papier-mâché, clothed figure drawing and music nights.
At the centre is a large untitled wall installation on a bulging plywood structure: framed notes, photographs of friends, textile-like patterns and even his father’s car sketches on napkins. A related piece belongs to SFMOMA, yet McGee says this version feels “entirely new” and unplanned.
From Twist to blue chip
McGee came out of San Francisco’s graffiti scene in the 1980s under the name Twist, known for melancholy male faces, bottles and stylised screws. He has since shown at the Hammer Museum, Fondazione Prada and the 2001 Venice Biennale, and this is his first gallery exhibition with Deitch in more than two decades, though the two have worked together since the 1990s. He resists the idea that he is simply bringing street art indoors; graffiti, he argues, was never made with a product in mind.
The ego question
The February takeover was not without friction: nearby buildings were tagged, and some participating artists complained of late payment, which organisers say has since been settled. At Deitch, the spirit is calmer but just as generous. “In this day and age, a solo anything seems ridiculous,” McGee says, preferring to place young and older artists side by side. His own paintings mix geometric patterns inspired partly by Islamic tile work with his trademark droopy-eyed faces.
The result is a reminder that some of the liveliest art spaces are not built around one star but around a community — with the star quietly hugging everyone at the door.