Allie McGhee (born in 1941, in Charleston, West Virginia) is a Detroit-based African American painter and pillar of the Detroit art community since the 1960s. Allie McGhee attended Cass Technical High School in Detroit, MI, and completed his undergraduate work at Eastern Michigan University in 1965.
McGhee’s paintings are lyrical, material-driven works rendered in swirling constellations of industrial paint and found media. Drawing inspiration from African cosmology, African symbolism, and free jazz, his work explores the inherent tensions between spontaneity and premeditation, intention and accident. McGhee’s art practice features painting and sculpture, consisting of collage, drape, and still compositions that enclose the spellbinding visuals of colors merging in a fusion of stains, dashes, and waves. A signature style of McGhee’s includes his Crushed Paintings, in which the artist turns compositions on vinyl, canvas or paper into amorphous forms.
McGhee comes from the same school of Black abstract painters which includes Sam Gilliam, Ed Clark, Jack Whitten, and McArthur Binion. His work is included in collections at the Detroit Institute of Arts, St. Louis Museum of Art, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among other institutions.
Biography
From an early age, Allie McGhee displayed an adamant interest in art-marking. With his mother’s encouragement, McGhee converted his family’s basement into his first artist studio. McGhee was heavily drawn to the Cubist Art period, and spent his childhood mimicking painters such as George Braque. Concurrent with his art-making process, McGhee developed a daily ritual of playing music whenever he practiced in the studio – an early indication of the artist's potent relationship between art and music.
In 1969, his friend and mentor Charles McGee curated a show at the Detroit Artist Market entitled "Seven Black Artists," which included Charles McGee himself, Allie, Harold Neal, Lester Johnson, Henri Umbaji King, Robert Murray, James Lee, and Robert J. Stull. The group would later form Gallery 7, a collective and gallery space located on 8232 West McNichols. There Allie McGhee taught art classes to youth.
Eventually, Allie McGhee became interested in themes related to science, and space exploration. He followed photographic captures from space study taken by the Hubble Telescope, creating paintings that are inspired by astrological forms.
Influences
Prior to the 1960s, artworks by Allie McGhee were primarily figurative before he transitioned to abstract painting. The 1967 Detroit Riots and the influx of experimental jazz music inspired the artist to engage with history, improvisation, and science through abstraction. McGhee grew weary of the limits of figurative painting while the Black Arts Movement called upon Black artists to contribute to the revolution by embodying a progressive, avant-garde, afrocentric visual, linguistic, and sonic aesthetic to help shape postmodern Black culture. Artworks such asBlack Attack, (1967), encapsulates a period of radical uproar, while artworks like Night Ritual, (1991) depicts a universal approach to pure abstraction. McGhee's study of the universal plane began as an inclination to document the micro and macro expressions of nature, through recurring symbols such as the line and curve. Which results in a picture plane of marks resembling prehistoric cave paintings and imagery that recalls the celestial sky.