about

Outside his studio windows near the Detroit River in early 2021, the sky was performing in tandem to Allie McGhee’s thoughtful ruminations on his trajectory as an artist. “It’s about THE ALL,” he explains sagely as the thunder rolls  and the rain begins –his voice, also a deep low rumble that slides across the air. The sun, still peeking through the gray dark rain clouds, envelops the room with a strange orange light , and the meteorlogical occurrence casts the effect of an alien invasion over the room. At that moment, the sublime meets its man-made equal in the culled chaos of McGhee’s paintings, still fresh with paint on the studio walls. Using industrial vinyl and paint, he tests, folds, and crumbles his artworks into symphonic compositions. The floors are strata of paint layers that serve as a decades-long record of McGhee’s eruptive and lyrical process of creation. The orange hue in the studio changes with the movement of the clouds, as if the divine is playing with a dimmer switch. Stacks of books about the cosmos and African art abut entry walls covered in yellowed newspaper articles, family photographs, curious found objects, material experiments and wooden African masks. Atop an old defunct intercom box, a petrified brown banana sits like an ancient sphinx—a symbol, a riddle, an icon—surveying the scene.

Laura Mott
Curator of Contemporary Art and Design
Cranbrook Art Museum

McGhee seems to have always been a man of faith—not necessarily in the orthodox sense, but in the ways that he tends to lean into intuition and his reverence for elders. It is a practice of trust and manifestation….

… spiritual sensibilities place McGhee within a cadre of Black artists—such as David Hammons, Alma Thomas, and Betye Saar—whose works are informed by spiritual and cosmological encounters with the divine. In this way, his works are somewhat referential, but always attending to a certain illegibility that may never be captured by an audience. McGhee offers viewers an opportunity to impose their own meanings about the symbols and gestures he has produced. The opacity of the work lends itself to a perpetual engagement of imagination for people who encounter it McGhee is a painter of extraordinary ability, who dares to dream through and beyond the technical. He commits to being experimental and desires to make mistakes, because this is where one can exhaust the full possibilities and pleasures of being human.

Taylor Renee Aldridge
Visual Arts Curator
California African-American Museum