Charles McGee was a versatile artist who preferred to let his art speak for him. A recent article in the Detroit Metro Times provided a retrospective of his work, noting that a section of the city would now be called the Charles McGee Legacy Park. How the reticent McGee, who died three years ago, would feel about this is, to some extent, found in how he viewed himself in the artistic realm.
“The world is my canvas,” he said in an interview with One Detroit. “I’m just one little speck on this canvas. I’m trying to understand that order that holds the world together. I think that if we understand it, we respect it. When we all work together, we understand more. We tolerate more. We live better lives.”
McGee was imbued with an understanding and tolerance that were critical to his living a better life—and a profound and productive one. Born in Clemson, S.C., on December 15, 1924, he was raised by sharecropping grandparents. He said his first artistic inspiration occurred while he was picking cotton, where “he observed firsthand the order and harmony that exists within nature.” His formal education began after he moved to Detroit when he was 10 years old.
Unlike the bucolic life in Clemson, Detroit was a fast-paced city. To McGee, “everything was on the move and it hasn’t slowed down yet,” he told a reporter. Reflecting on these early years, he said, “I learned something not being in school—because life is school…I learn something every time I move. Every time I go around a corner, something new is revealed to me.”
When you live for nearly a century, you have traversed a lot of terrain, turned many corners, and accumulated a wealth of knowledge and wisdom. Even so, McGee did acquire some classroom lessons at George Washington Elementary School and art classes at the McGregor Public Library in Highland Park, an enclave of Detroit. Later, at Cleveland High School near Hamtramck, another Detroit enclave, McGee was a creative designer and coordinator of float construction for the school’s parades. One of the first jobs he had after high school was working for the Briggs Manufacturing Company, where he learned welding that would later be useful to his development as a sculptor, just as he would invest working as a cartographer in his mixed media works.
In 1943, perhaps before the city exploded in a race riot, McGee enlisted in the Marine Corps, serving three years as World War II raged. He was stationed in Nagasaki, as part of the Allied occupation of Japan, after the atomic bomb was dropped.
Back in Detroit, McGee used the GI Bill to attend classes at the College for Creative Studies, then known as the Society of Arts and Crafts. By the mid-1950s, he was part of the emerging Black consciousness that grew out of the Civil Rights Movement. He was a member of a cadre of Black artists—Harold Neal, Henri Umbaji King, Leroy Foster, et al.—who extended their artistic creations with Afrocentric themes.
“I think there was always a Black consciousness,” he said, “but I don’t think it was exhibited on the same scale as it has been since Stokely Carmichael or Malcolm X. I think Malcolm X was one of the people who made Black people aware of Black people.”
A one-year sojourn in Barcelona, in 1968, helped McGee embark on a different artistic motif, one embodied by abstract form, although he continued to create works of realism. His “Noah’s Ark: Genesis,” created in 1984, is on display and part of his collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts. His sculpture “United We Stand,” located outside the Charles Wright Museum of African American History, is representative of his expansive imagination.
The students whom McGee taught at Western Michigan University from 1969 to 1987, and at other institutions, all benefited from his desire to inspire them with a collective outlook, a sense of humility, and respect for others.
In 2008, McGee was the inaugural recipient of the Kresge Eminent Artist honor, administered by the College for Creative Studies and given to an artist for professional achievements, cultural contributions, and commitment to the local arts community. Being the first award is symbolic of McGee’s creative genius, and the artistic vision and production he bestowed on Detroit, specifically, and the world generally.
He died on February 4, 2021 in Detroit at 96.