Inside 7000 Santa Monica Boulevard, the sharp bite of fresh aerosol blends with cedar shavings and stale bodega coffee. Across the polished concrete floor of what was once RCA Victor's West Coast recording studio, sixty-year-old Barry McGee paces in paint-streaked canvas workwear, gesturing toward a salon wall stacked three stories high. Bolted across the drywall are thousands of painted wooden diamond panels, interspersed with sagging shelves holding hundreds of empty Thunderbird, malt liquor, and port bottles bearing sorrowful cartoon faces.
Running from October 30, 2026 to January 30, 2027, the solo exhibition Barry McGee: Another Round marks the artist's first official gallery show with dealer Jeffrey Deitch in over twenty years. Working alongside roughly two hundred artist friends and underground peers, McGee has turned a storied Hollywood soundstage into an overflowing, chaotic celebration of street-level craft. For longtime followers of contemporary urban culture, the exhibition mounted at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery represents a landmark reunion between two figures who changed how institutions reckon with outlaw art.
The Threshold: Pushing Past the Gallery Fence
To enter the gallery at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and North Orange Drive is to step through what McGee calls another hole in the fence. Visitors bypass traditional reception counters and navigate straight into wooden shipping skids, stacks of hand-screened zines, and discarded cardboard boxes covered in felt-tip marker tags. McGee treats the high-ceilinged room less like a pristine showroom and more like an open rail yard where everyone is invited to pull up a crate.
McGee cut his teeth in 1980s San Francisco writing under the graffiti moniker "Twist", making his mark on freight train panels, highway underpasses, and decaying Mission District facades. Alongside his late wife Margaret Kilgallen, who died of complications from breast cancer in 2001, McGee helped establish the Mission School. That loose collective championed sign painter enamels, folk typography, and found urban lumber over manufactured canvas, finding enduring beauty in weathered, overlooked urban surfaces.
Barry McGee Another Round: Twenty-Six Years After Street Market
The creative partnership between dealer and artist runs back more than a quarter-century. In October 2000, Deitch hosted McGee alongside Stephen Powers (ESPO) and Todd James (REAS) for Street Market at Deitch Projects on Wooster Street in SoHo. That historic installation upended the Manhattan gallery world by building an entire battered streetscape of simulated bodegas, check-cashing counters, and overturned delivery trucks directly inside the gallery.
Writing in The New York Times, critic Jonathan Griffin crowned the artist the geezer of graffiti art, noting his steadfast refusal to sand down his edges. McGee remains suspicious of commercial polish, preferring the company of printmakers, skaters, and outsider eccentrics. He views the gallery space not as an investment bank vault, but as an open clubhouse for unscripted community encounters.
This Hollywood reunion also builds on the momentum of an unruly pop-up earlier this year. During Frieze Week in February and March 2026, McGee, Deitch, and gallery partner The Hole took over a shuttered discount store at 6121 Wilshire Boulevard for 99CENT. That massive 20,000-square-foot takeover featured an uncurated swap meet of outsider art, late-night music, and spontaneous tagging that spilled into the surrounding neighborhood, setting the stage for this expansive gallery follow-up.
The Central Floor: Optical Diamonds and Droopy-Eyed Relics
Step onto the cavernous central floor, where the acoustic ghosts of Miles Davis, Elvis Presley, and The Beach Boys once tracked records. The room is dominated by an overwhelming visual rhythm: thousands of diamond, rhombus, and checkerboard panels clustered in towering organic clouds. Painted in a restricted palette of bold crimson, pitch black, golden ochre, and soft flesh pink, these geometric constellations generate a kinetic moiré effect that hums before your eyes.
Anchoring these dizzying optical fields are McGee's iconic character portraits: down-and-out men with drooping eyelids, sagging jowls, and hollow expressions gazing blankly into the middle distance. He paints them on the rounded bellies of empty liquor bottles arranged in long rows on weathered timber brackets. These figures do not plead for sympathy; they simply bear witness to the wear and tear of urban survival.
The sheer accumulation of material is mesmerizing: dozens of hand-carved wooden heads perched on wooden poles; clusters of vintage snapshots showing Bay Area train tracks and surf breaks; stacks of discarded plywood stamped with repetitive geometric motifs; and hand-lettered wooden signs mimicking vintage liquor store promos, all held together in an unbroken, rhythmic chorus that sweeps across fifty feet of gallery wall.
Inside the Hive: Heavy Manners Library and the 99-Cent Shrine
Wander deeper into the eastern wing of the hall, and the exhibition shifts into a bustling social commons. McGee has installed a functional reading room and bookstore run in collaboration with Matthew James-Wilson of Heavy Manners Library, the beloved independent art space in nearby Echo Park. Visitors can pull up a folding chair to browse rare self-published artist books, photography folios, and underground periodicals.
This space functions as an active production workshop rather than a passive display. A risograph press hums in the corner, churning out freshly inked zines while visitors sit at wooden tables for drop-in figure drawing and collage sessions. The scent of printing toner mingles with cedar shavings from McGee's ongoing wood carvings.
Adjacent to the reading tables stands a miniature, affectionate recreation of the Wilshire 99-cent store. Cheap plastic buckets, novelty flyswatters, and discount snacks share shelf space with hand-painted ceramic plates and miniature McGee line drawings. It humorously blurs the line between throwaway consumer kitsch and high-priced contemporary art.
The Back Alcoves: A Community Salon
Slip through the rear archway into the secondary galleries, and the spotlight pivots away from McGee entirely. Here, the artist displays works from approximately two hundred creative comrades, hanging small sketches, Polaroids, ceramic vessels, and cut stencils in a dense floor-to-ceiling salon. Foundational Bay Area peers share the same drywall with self-taught makers, sign painters, and teenage zine editors, united by mutual respect and a dedication to handmade graphic work.
Stepping onto Santa Monica Boulevard: Street Culture Without the Cleanse
Stepping back out into the bright afternoon haze of Hollywood, the roaring traffic of Santa Monica Boulevard feels directly linked to the room you just left. McGee's enduring achievement is proving that street art does not need to be sanitized to command a major cultural stage. By preserving the raw grit, collaborative chaos, and unpolished warmth of his Mission District roots, he reminds visitors why urban art captivated the public imagination in the first place.
The impulse that drove 1980s train writers to claim raw steel now commands museum halls and permanent collections of graffiti wall art, proving that street-tagging iconography, skate deck graphics, and bold geometric patterns have become enduring visual languages rather than passing street fads. McGee was among the first to translate that vernacular energy onto gallery walls without smoothing out its jagged edges.
Before leaving the block, glance back through the front gallery window one last time. Barry McGee is still at work near the front risograph table, handing a freshly stapled booklet to a teenager with a skateboard under his arm. Some artists graduate from the street to become distant luxury brands; McGee simply turns every gallery he touches into an open clubhouse.
