Barry McGee: Reproduction

This monograph is the first to collect the photographs of internationally acclaimed multimedia artist Barry McGee.

Though best known for the inventive graphic sensibility of his paintings, drawings, and installations, McGee’s use of photography is an essential component of his artistic vision. Captured at all hours and around the world with whatever camera is at hand, McGee’s images are immediate, casual, intimate, and anarchic all at once. His work boldly employs geometric shapes, clusters of framed drawings and paintings, distinctive characters, and found objects such as empty bottles, surfboards, and wrecked vehicles. Whether incorporated into his iconic multi-element compositions, or printed in the innumerable fanzines and artist’s books that often accompany his exhibitions, photographs pervade McGee’s practice. Barry McGee: Reproduction provides unique insight into the process of a major American artist, and is a testament to the immense amount of visual information McGee has absorbed to build one of the most eclectic and innovative artistic legacies of our time.

Barry McGee (born in San Francisco, 1966) is among San Francisco’s most internationally influential artists. He received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and is a prominent member of the Mission School, a group of graffiti and DIY artists that emerged from San Francisco’s Mission District in the late 1990s. His work has been exhibited worldwide, including at the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Berkeley Museum of Art and Pacific Film Archive, California; and Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy, among others.

Ari Marcopoulos is an artist, filmmaker, photographer, and bookmaker currently living and working in New York. He has been subject of several solo exhibitions, including at FOAM, Amsterdam; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California; and MoMA PS1, Queens, New York. Marcopoulos participated in two Whitney Biennials (2008 and 2010), and his photographs are in collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; and Detroit Institute of Arts. His films include Detroit (2008), The Park (2018), and nora chipaumire: #PUNK (2020).

Sandra S. Phillips is a writer, editor, and curator emerita of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. During her nearly thirty-year tenure at SFMOMA, Phillips curated numerous influential exhibitions, including Police Pictures: The Photograph as Evidence (1997), the first exhibition to examine historical and contemporary photographs taken as evidence; Daido Moriyama: Stray Dog (1999), the first museum exhibition to survey the work of this important postwar Japanese photographer; Ansel Adams at 100 (2001), organized with John Szarkowski; and Diane Arbus: Revelations (2003), the first complete showing of Arbus’s legendary photographs and writings. Phillips’s most recent publication is American Geography: Photographs of Land Use from 1840 to the Present (2021).

Sandy Kim is a photographer living in Los Angeles.