Exhibit of the week: Barry McGee

The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

Through Sept. 2

Barry McGee “brought fine art to graffiti and then brought street art into museums,” said Jody Feinberg in the Quincy, Mass., Patriot Ledger. Though the San Francisco native attended art school, he made his mark in the streets. In the 1980s and ’90s, when graffiti offered a way to express outrage about conditions in the city, McGee “used fine-art techniques to assert both his own identity and those of the downtrodden.” His boldly rendered cartoon faces—often expressing anger or despair—became iconic, and even after his art moved indoors and expanded into collages and installations, his work retained an anarchic streak. Several of the 30 or so works in this midcareer retrospective celebrate the act of creating graffiti, including a group of eight figures that each are waving a spray-paint can in front of a gray splotch on a wall. “It’s as though McGee were saying that we all are graffiti artists, in the sense that we want to matter and have a voice.”

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Much of the time, though, he appears to be saying little at all, said Sebastian Smee in The Boston Globe. McGee has been a vocal, articulate defender of illicit graffiti, seeing it as a way for marginalized people to reclaim public space from the powerful. Yet even though the paintings and installations here “make for an entertaining, mildly rambunctious show,” they “lack the congested power of art fired by conviction.” Take his mechanized graffi-tists, “pounding away at the wall.” You could look at the work as a snarky rejoinder to those who dismiss graffiti as mindless vandalism. But it also suggests that McGee may be aware of the fuzziness in his thinking. He excels at representing the ideals of youthful protest “without really having anything urgent to communicate himself.”

The viewer’s thirst for powerful imagery hardly goes unquenched, said Greg Cook in WBUR.org. While the cartoonish characters in the first two galleries tend to blend together, an untitled installation in the third “stops you cold.” On the side of a rusty shed, McGee has painted a cartoon man on his hands and knees. Inside the structure awaits a floor-to-ceiling display of paintings and drawings by McGee’s late wife, Margaret Kilgallen, who died of breast cancer at 33 after refusing treatment that might harm the fetus she succeeded in carrying to term. Thanks to Kilgallen’s light touch, “the atmosphere is sweet and jaunty” inside the shed, but the work “feels like both a tomb and a shrine to Kilgallen, to the incredible sacrifice she made, to the terrible loss McGee and his newborn daughter suffered.” Is it urgent? You bet.