During his long life Charles William McGee was an artist interested in diverse subjects and skilled with many different materials. He was also a dedicated teacher and active member of his community—a “mover and shaker”—who made art for public spaces, organized exhibitions, and taught college students, as well as local youths and incarcerated individuals.
McGee was born on a sharecropper’s farm belonging to his grandfather near Clemson, South Carolina. He had little formal schooling and no art education before his move to Detroit in 1934, another example of the Great Migration. Once relocated he took art classes at the public library and was given a scholarship by the Detroit Institute of Arts to take evening drawing classes. Students drew from works in the museum’s collection, about which McGee said: “the museum was freeing, and I was in heaven. It opened up a whole new world.”
Unfortunately, McGee’s formal education ended in the tenth grade with the death of his mother. He was employed on a Works Progress Administration painting project before taking a factory job in the foundry and learned how to handle metal—a critical skill that served him well later when he made large-scale sculptures. Between 1943 and 1947 McGee served in the United States Marines and was stationed in the South Pacific as part of an all-Black supply company. He also worked in the laundry where he became acquainted with different fabrics, information that proved useful when he began making collages. Following his military service McGee returned to Detroit and took another job on an auto industry assembly line until the early 1950s when he shifted to the United States Army Tank Automotive Center. He was employed as a draftsman there until 1967.
Using the GI Bill, McGee took classes as a part-time student for ten years at the Society of Arts and Crafts (now the College for Creative Studies). He also became involved in the Black art scene in Detroit where Hughie Lee-Smith was active. McGee continued to visit the Detroit Institute of Arts where in 1955 he saw Jacob Lawrence’s John Brown series. In late 1967 he quit his industry job and began a yearlong sojourn in Barcelona, enrolling first at the municipal Escuela Massana, but shortly afterward moving on to another school where he concentrated on printmaking. He saw work by Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró and became enchanted by “the texture of living, the colors, [and] the oldness of everything” in Spain.
Upon his return to Detroit, in 1969 McGee opened Gallery 7, for the specific purpose of exhibiting Black art and selling African masks. He also organized the Charles McGee School of Art, where volunteer instructors taught Black youth. The school remained active until 1974. During the spring term of 1970 he was one of twelve Black artists in residence at the University of Delaware. At Eastern Michigan University in Lansing he first served in a similar position in 1969 before becoming a tenured faculty member until his retirement in 1987. In 1978 McGee founded the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit and received the first Michigan Foundation for the Arts (now the Michigan Council) award. In 2008 the Kresge Foundation honored him with the first Eminent Detroit Artist award.
Initially a painter who depicted African and Egyptian infused imagery, McGee also enjoyed experimenting in a variety of materials and techniques: he had a non-objective phase on shaped canvases, made collages, and did large scale charcoal drawings; he also dabbled in plaster, which gave texture to his surfaces, as well as neon for reliefs. In addition, he was responsible for several large public commissions crafted from aluminum, both in relief and large, freestanding sculptures. He explained his goals: “Discovering solutions that transform mundane public spaces into lively, aesthetic, people-friendly environments is the will or force that motivates my work. … I am convinced that public art has a responsibility to educate, to maintain integrity, and to act in the service of its audience.”