Richard McGuire (American, b. 1957) has produced an enormously diverse body of work in multiple media, characterized throughout by intelligence, wit, conceptual integrity, and the use of elegant, minimal design to communicate complicated ideas about the human experience.
McGuire first gained notice in the early 1980s as the bassist and founding member of the seminal post-punk band Liquid Liquid, for which he designed all of the posters and album artwork. One of their most famous tracks, Cavern, was appropriated by Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel and became the hit song White Lines. The matter was resolved some years later in an out-of-court settlement.
Emerging from the downtown New York scene, where art and music co-mingled, McGuire’s street art was included in the 1981 exhibition New York/New Wave, at MoMA PS1, alongside the work of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
McGuire has produced a small but important body of comics work, including the short story “Here” which appeared in Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly’s RAW Magazine in 1989. The piece reconfigured the way comics depict time and space and is recognized as a transformative work. It later became the basis for the graphic novel of the same name, published in 2014 by Pantheon Books. Here has since been translated into more than 20 languages. In 2016, it won the Fauve d'Or, the top award in France for graphic novels.
In 2022, it was announced that a film adaptation of Here would be directed by Robert Zemeckis, starring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright.
Throughout his career, McGuire’s artistic practice has remained multidisciplinary. He is an illustrator and longtime contributor to The New Yorker, for which he has produced numerous covers and interior illustrations. He has also written and illustrated several children’s books, designed toys and other products, created interactive media, and directed and designed animation, including the short film Micro Loup (2002) and the closing segment for the animated anthology film Fear(s) of the Dark (2007). In 2018, he exhibited 60 sculptures at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, in Ridgefield, Connecticut.
All of McGuire’s work shares a simplified aesthetic, built out of minimal forms, often combined in dizzying ways. His approach to diagrammatic abstraction remains mindful of the relationship between line, shape, and form, and permits seamless shifts in scale and perspective even as it moves from medium to medium. McGuire’s work reorganizes perception to suggest larger connections between time, people, and places.
His work is included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Morgan Library and Museum, and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.