Episode No. 44 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features artists Barry McGee and Jim Campbell.
A mid-career survey of McGee’s work is on view at the Berkeley Art Museum through December 9.
McGee attended the San Francisco Art Institute, but he emerged as an artist outside traditional white-cube spaces. Instead: Over 20 years ago a precocious tagger named Twist started leaving graffiti all over San Francisco. He took his visual language not so much from art history, but from other graffiti artists, comic books, traditional hobo markings and more, and used it all to take aim at the ownership of public space and the mostly corporate advertising that was increasingly filling that space in booming 1990s San Francisco.
Now after finishing with ‘Twist,’ McGee has emerged as an important figure in street-driven art. The BAM survey of McGee’s career was curated by director Lawrence Rinder and assistant curator Dena Beard.
On the second segment. Jim Campbell talks about Exploded Views, the huge light installation he’s made for SFMOMA’s atrium lobby. (That JPEG is hard to ‘read,’ so check out this SFMOMA video and this Hosfelt Gallery slideshow-and-video instead.) The piece takes off from Campbell’s 2010 installation in New York’s Madison Square Park, Campbell’s first foray into representing a two dimensional moving image in three dimensions. This fall Campbell will receive SFMOMA’s 2012 Bay Area Treasure Award. Previous honorees include Mark di Suvero, Wayne Thiebaud and William T. Wiley.
Air date: Sept. 6, 2012.