SAN FRANCISCO — “This is one of my favorite things to do,” Barry McGee said as he drove along the Bayshore Freeway on a glowering winter day, pointing out random patches of new graffiti. He was supposed to be talking about his traveling midcareer retrospective, which opens Saturday at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Instead, he was revisiting some of the places where he’d spent time in the late 1980s and early ’90s, as he rose to prominence as the graffiti artist known as Twist.

Since those days, the whole South of Market area, once known for its seediness, has been redeveloped, gentrified. Mr. McGee had to drive past several blocks of trendy loft buildings before finding a slice of ruined waterfront that resembled the streets he once roamed. He finally stopped at a crumbling warehouse by the bay.

As he searched for an entrance, Mr. McGee recalled that he and his friends had once plastered that building and others many times over with writing and drawings. “It’s the last square mile of San Francisco that’s like this,” he said. “You feel it closing in, though.”

Mr. McGee, 46, seemed to be talking about more than real estate. For more than two decades he has worked in two worlds: that of graffiti art, where he’s still revered though no longer openly active, and that of museums and galleries, where his street-culture-inspired installations, often featuring kinetic sculptures, Op-Art-inflected abstractions and finely wrought depictions of sad-sack bums, have flourished.

Since 1991, when he finished his B.F.A. at the San Francisco Art Institute, Mr. McGee has created installations at scores of well-known venues, from the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and Deitch Projects in New York to the Carnegie International and the Venice Biennale expositions. Now his career itself seems on the brink of gentrification, starting with the retrospective, which opened in August at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. “Barry is arguably the most internationally influential artist who lives in the Bay Area,” said Lawrence Rinder, the museum’s director, who said he mounted the show because it was time “to look at the development of his themes and modalities.”

There’s a smaller show, too, opening on Sunday at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, featuring three new installations. Next September, Mr. McGee will make his debut with the blue-chip Chelsea gallery Cheim & Read, better known for representing the estates of Joan Mitchell and Louise Bourgeois.

“Barry doesn’t need to be in a gallery that will put him into a program of street art,” said Mr. McGee’s primary dealer, Chris Perez, the owner of Ratio 3 gallery in San Francisco. “That’s a context he’s entirely uninterested in.”

Yet Mr. McGee, gentle and tending toward self-deprecation, seems on the fence. On the one hand, he’ll say, “I’m definitely too old to be talking about graffiti, that’s for sure.” But on the other: “I’m glad it’s over,” he said of the Berkeley show. “I’m not sure I like the attention.”

Later, leafing through the show’s catalog, he asked: “Should we really go through it? Is that weird?”

He spoke in a half-genuine, half-joking way that made it hard to tell whether he was really bothered. “I hate this catalog more than anything in the world,” he said. “I’d love to spray-paint over areas.”

Jenelle Porter, the senior curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, who is organizing the Boston show, said: “Barry likes to keep his feet in both worlds and yet is conflicted about that, I think. He has an interesting kind of situation to straddle that other contemporary artists don’t, in that it’s important for his work to maintain credibility for a younger audience, as well as all the collectors who are buying his work.”

Prices for that work range from $15,000 for a diptych to $300,000 for an installation. “It’s very tricky to manage something like that,” Ms. Porter added. “You just have more people with more expectations.”

But perhaps the person with the biggest expectations is Mr. McGee himself.