Allie McGhee

Allie McGhee is a Detroit-based African-American painter and pillar of the Detroit art community since the 1960s. 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, free jazz, and the industrial environment of his hometown, his work explores the inherent tensions between spontaneity and premeditation, intention, and accident.

Under recognized throughout much of his career, McGhee’s work was the subject of a major retrospective, Banana Moon Horn, which opened October 2021 at Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Most recently, his work has been the subject of two solo presentations—Allie McGhee: Parallax, Harper’s, New York, and Allie McGhee: The Ritual of The Mask, Belle Isle Viewing Room, Detroit, Michigan.

McGhee comes from the same school of Black abstract painters that 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.