Art21 made a exclusive video profile of Barry McGee that includes footage of his street-bombing alter ego TWIST painting trains and how he expands that experience into the scale and materials in his art exhibitions. Created in 2012 during his retrospective exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives.

McGee on the nature of creating work for art institutions versus tagging:

I know how it works with the street: you have the maximum amount of exposure that you’ll ever get. Going indoors is like marching backwards. I’ve tried over the last ten years to do more things on a museum’s façade or outside, still in the public view. But I have varying degrees of success with that because it’s all kind of fake, or they become illustrations of what the real thing is…The whole exhibition is more of a guidebook.

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