Professor at University of Akron. Additionally McKean lectures widely, with talks at Columbia University, Yale University, New York University, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Southern California, The Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths College, Maryland Institute College of Art, San Francisco Institute of Art among many others. McKean is also the Co-Director of ASMBLY, based in New york city. Artwork McKean is interested in sculpture’s capacities and limitations for meaning transmission. Concerning this and the narrative potential of his work, McKean states: "I realized, perhaps counterintuitively, that a sculpture is actually missing the tools to communicate a true narrative arc, lacking the most basic elements required in storytelling: a beginning and end. Without an originating point and a totalizing conclusion, a sculpture exists as an inherently unstable device for narration, forever swirling around in medias res. This was an important realization for me, that within sculpture’s genetic makeup I couldn’t create the meanings contained in our most culturally popular forms: think the novel, the essay, film, TV shows, YouTube videos, theater, music. Sculpture is a strange communication outlier, almost mystical by design. Yet for me realizing this limitation created some generative conditions to not only think about the nature sculpture, but to think through the process of how one could make a sculpture." McKean’s discursive practice often involves creating projects within projects. As part of his large scale installation Riverboat Lovesongs for the Ghost Whale Regatta, presented at Grand Arts in Kansas City, McKean researched in the linkage circumnavigation and failure. McKean set out to discover the longest possible straight-line route an individual could use to circumnavigate the earth, naming the route the Great Circuit. The route takes into consideration the literally millions of minute shifts in elevation encountered while actually traveling to ultimately arrive at the longest path around the earth. McKean commissioned the University of Kansas Department of Geography and Cartography to help engineer an algorithm using their computer array to sift and arrange billions of geographic data points. In late spring of 2006 the route was discovered. Writing about Mckean’s work, Stacy Switzer states: "The Great Circuit is a conceptual artwork and a counterintuitive test of limits based on a hypothetical journey that may or may not be physically possible. As the catalyst for an extraordinary body of information—one born of hard science but which hovers unfixed to the realm of common utility—McKean performs