Charles McGee opens the shepherd

The Shepherd's first show is a Charles McGee retrospective. It is appropriate. McGee, who died in 2021 at 96, was probably the most influential Detroit artist of the last century, and the inaugural exhibition was something Library Street Collective worked out with him before he passed. Time Is Now runs from May 18 through July 20. MOCAD artistic director Jova Lynne curated the show with assistant curator Abel González Fernández. The work is laid out across three rooms in the new gallery spaces. Room one is a survey of McGee's practice across mediums, with sketchbook drawings hung beside enamel-on-wood pieces and large sculptures. Room two functions as the archive, with documents from his career as a curator and educator. Room three positions him as a contemporary American artist, in conversation with the work happening now. McGee was born in 1924 and moved to Detroit as a child. He graduated from the school that became the College for Creative Studies, made impressionist work in his early career, traveled to Europe, came back, and from 1969 to 1979 ran Gallery 7, a space dedicated almost entirely to Black Detroit artists at a time when no other gallery in the city was showing them. He founded the Charles McGee School of Art the same year, offering free instruction to Detroit kids until 1974. He taught at Eastern Michigan University for 18 years. In 2008, he was the first artist to receive the Kresge Eminent Artist Award. The pieces on view at the Shepherd include Ancestral Spirits from 2005, a smaller enamel-on-wood work, and Play Patterns II, the larger assemblage that the curators describe as the show's anchor. Linkage Series (Blue 1) from 2017 is in the main gallery. Carousel, a detailed drawing his daughter Lyndsay McGee picked out, is also installed. Outside the building, Charles McGee Legacy Park is the permanent component. Three large sculptures, the last works McGee finished with the Curises before he died, sit in the green space, including his first figurative piece in public sculpture. The park stays open year-round. A sister exhibition, Kin-ship: The Legacy of Gallery 7, opens at MOCAD on June 28. 1265 Parkview Street, East Village.