Encyclopedia Of Detroit

Charles William McGee was a Detroit artist of international renown, as well as an educator. Creator of paintings, sculptures and assemblages, he was a fixture of Detroit’s contemporary art scene and co-founder of the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit. 

Born on December 15, 1924 in Clemson, South Carolina, he was brought up by his grandparents, former sharecroppers. It was there that he developed a relationship with the land and felt the harmony in nature. He was without formal schooling until he arrived in Detroit at age ten where he lived with an aunt and uncle. His mother was hospitalized in Herman Kiefer Hospital with tuberculosis and died in 1936. 

McGee attended George Washington Elementary School. He also took part in art classes at Highland Park’s McGregor Public Library and went to Cleveland High School in nearby Hamtramck where his artistic abilities contributed to the high school’s float designs for school parades. 

McGee worked at Briggs Manufacturing before being drafted in World War II and sent to Nagasaki. He returned to Detroit and on the GI Bill went to what was then the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts, now the College for Creative Studies. With a full-time job, McGee did not graduate until 1957. In 1968, he went to Barcelona, Spain on a year-long grant to study art, a time he counted as crucial in his artistic journey. Over the years he taught at the University of Michigan and the Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center. For nearly twenty years he was an instructor at Eastern Michigan University. 

His kinetic art reflects a joyousness in his African American roots and a love of nature, compared by one to the rhythmic music of jazz. In 1969 he was one of the artists in the Detroit Artists Market’s seminal exhibit “Seven Black Artists,” spawning Gallery 7, which McGee opened a year later. The gallery also had free art classes for children, exemplifying his role as a mentor. 

McGee claimed to be proudest of opening his own art school, Charles McGee School for the Arts. His strong presence in Detroit’s art community was rewarded in 2008 when he was named the first Kresge Eminent Artist, which came with a $50,000 prize from the Kresge Foundation. Described as “an important chronicler of black life in urban America … [with a] vision of building a better, more beautiful and uplifting world,” McGee never left Detroit despite his international fame. 

McGee’s works are found in several museums including the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, where he has 12 pieces including Noah’s Ark: Genesis, and the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History where United We Stand is displayed in front. His Blue Nile is at the Broadway People Mover station and the 2017 mural Unity, is an 11-story mural in Capitol Park. 

In 2012 the Detroit News honored him with a Michiganian of the Year award and in 2019 he received a Legacy Award from Michigan Legacy Art Park to recognize his “lifetime of achievements and influences as an artist, teacher, advocate and global citizen. 

A stroke in 2011 limited his ability to work, though he did not stop working. His last project was creating stylized figures for the Charles McGee Legacy Park that opened on Detroit’s east side in 2024. He died in his Rosedale Park home on February 4, 2021 at the age of 96.