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"Long a hero to street artists, McGee has found acceptance from the mainstream art world, exhibiting at Ratio 3, in San Francisco, and Modern Art, in London, among other galleries. The artist who used to tag as Twist has two high-profile shows this spring: a&amp;nbsp;solo exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and a midcareer retrospective at the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston. McGee never imagined himself reaching this point when he first began posting his work on the streets of his native San Francisco in the 1980s. And in some ways he still isn\u2019t sure what exactly is the key to winning recognition from galleries and museums. Bryan Hood spoke with the artist about graffiti\u2019s history and how it transitions into the white cube.What is the idea behind your show in Fort Worth?It feels the same as any other show to me, in some weird way. I\u2019m doing an exhibition at a community college this month also, and I\u2019m just as anxious about that&amp;nbsp;as I am the others. I try to treat everything equally somehow. It\u2019s new work for Fort Worth, pretty straightforward, three pieces in a mature setting. Sometimes it\u2019s hard for me figure out how to edit. What goes in, what doesn\u2019t. I just want to put in everything. I\u2019m going to do drawing, painting, and sculpture. I\u2019m interested in anything but installation right now. I\u2019m intrigued by the idea of a painting or a drawing hanging on the wall, a sculpture sitting on the floor, with nothing else around to distract it, no videos, no environment. I\u2019ve always done painting on the walls and then brought my entire studio&amp;nbsp;and assistants into a gallery, but I\u2019m interested in the complete opposite right now.Your survey at ICA Boston is roughly the same show that was up at the Berkeley Art Museum, right?Yes. It\u2019s an edited version, but there will be some similar pieces. Berkeley lends itself to building bigger works and some environmental things. That helped illustrate some of the points better. In Boston it\u2019s a more formal gallery setting with white walls. It might read better. I\u2019m thinking in Boston it will seem more serious. The artifacts will look more like artifacts, whereas in Berkeley they just looked like garbage from the street. It fascinates me a little bit, the authority of a white room. A\u2019m also going to do an outdoor project for the exhibition, somewhere along the freeway, which will take care of my desire to communicate to younger, more diverse people. I\u2019ve always liked a mix of audiences, no matter if it was on the street or indoors. The walls along the freeways and the train tracks\u2014I still think about locations like that. That\u2019s the way graffiti works: It communicates to a different audience that something is in their city.Do you worry that you\u2019ll lose your grasp on street art as you get older?I lost my grasp long ago! I haven\u2019t given up on it; it still informs my work but not in the same way as when I was in my early 20s. There\u2019s something about the street, a messiness or a fleeting moment that I still try to keep in my work.What\u2019s it like looking back on your earlier career now? I have to be perfectly honest: It\u2019s very difficult to look at some of that work, to&amp;nbsp;be in the same room with it. That\u2019s the thing about graffiti: Normally it gets painted over and there\u2019s not a good record of what happened. I\u2019ve always liked being in charge of what happens, that imagery. But with works that were made at that time it\u2019s impossible. Someone can pull it off the street; it was just impossible to control where it went or how it would be reeled back into a show.Early on, could you ever have imagined having a midcareer retrospective? I was going to museums and trying to find a connection at that young age. I liked&amp;nbsp;the challenge of it, but I found there was nothing that spoke to me about what my friends and I were doing. I didn\u2019t understand how people got there at that point, what the process was to make it into a museum. I\u2019m still not exactly sure.Do you feel a responsibility to the younger generation?There\u2019s a history with graffiti that has to be shared. That sharing is done in different ways now, obviously, through the Internet. But to see a work that was part of something bigger, I think it can inspire kids."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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