The Shepherd, interior of the repurposed Romanesque sanctuary, adjacent library and exhibition spaces, designed by Peterson Rich Office/Photo: K.A. Letts

From humble storefront congregations to architecturally distinguished nineteenth-century houses of worship, Detroit is a city of churches with, it seems, one on every corner. Over time though, as the city’s population has diminished, many of its most beautiful sacred structures have fallen into disrepair. In typical, make-do Detroit fashion, breweries, recording studios and coffee shops have taken over some of these underused spaces, repurposing and preserving important elements of the city’s architecture.

The creative forces behind The Shepherd, a recently opened multi-use art and community center, have taken this dynamic to the next level. When the gallerist couple Anthony and JJ Curis conceived of the project, they found plenty of available real estate. The property they landed on was the former Good Shepherd Roman Catholic Church, a stately, medium-sized Romanesque church built in 1905, with a handsome adjoining rectory, surrounded by a 3.5 acre park. The immediate neighborhood, now called the Little Village, features a typical Detroit mix of open land, urban tree farms, and commercial and residential real estate in various states of repair and disrepair. The church, now beautifully adapted to its new function by the architectural design firm Peterson Rich Office, includes two exhibition spaces and an archive dedicated to documentation of art by African American artists, as well as flexible performance space. The previously dark interior of the Romanesque-style building is mitigated by well-designed indirect lighting, resulting in a luminous spherical interior, elegant and serene.

Charles McGee, “Untitled,” c. 1980s-1990s, mixed media on wood, 17 1/4″ x 24″ x 1/4″/Photo: K.A. Letts

It is fitting that the first exhibition now installed in this formerly—and possibly still—sacred space is a mini-retrospective of the work of Charles McGee (1924-2021), one of Detroit’s best-known and most beloved contemporary artists. McGee can be plausibly described as the secular patron saint of art in Detroit. His sixty-year career as a creative force included his studio practice and numerous public-art commissions that dot the city’s landscape, as well as his eighteen years as an arts educator at Eastern Michigan University. He founded and operated the Charles McGee School of Art, which provided free art instruction to the city’s youth from 1969 to 1974, and created Gallery 7, a groundbreaking showcase for work of previously neglected Black Detroit artists. In 2008, he received the Kresge Eminent Artist award—the first artist to be so honored.

Born in Clemson, South Carolina, McGee came to Detroit in 1934 as a ten-year-old grandchild of sharecroppers during the Great Migration. The young boy, who had previously received no formal education, enrolled in George Washington Elementary School, and later studied at Cleveland High School, before dropping out in tenth grade to help support his family. He joined the army in 1943 and was stationed near Nagasaki in the aftermath of World War II. Upon his discharge, he took advantage of the GI Bill to attend the Center for Creative Studies (formerly known as the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts) and took a menial job as a welder at Briggs Manufacturing to support himself while making art.

Charles McGee, “Untitled,” 2001, mixed media on foamcore mounted to wood panel, 17 1/2″ x 24″ x 1/4″/Photo: K.A. Letts

McGee loved Detroit, and the city returned his passion. When other Black artists departed for the coasts, McGee stayed. As he explained in a 2008 interview, “Detroit was more fitting with my temperament, and I wanted to build a mecca here for young artists, especially for Black artists, because at that time, they had very little exposure.”

The Shepherd honors McGee’s historic contributions and continuing cultural importance in Detroit with its inaugural exhibition, “Time Is Now,” on view in the reconfigured church’s two galleries until July 20. The curator of the exhibition, Jova Lynne of MOCAD (Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit) has assembled artworks from McGee’s later career that invite an expanded public appreciation for his importance.

Charles McGee, “Ancestral Spirits,” 2005, enamel on wood, 30 1/2″ x 24″ x 3″/Photo: K.A. Letts

In the first gallery, a selection of sixteen pieces ranging from sketchbook drawings to sculpture to a monumental wall-size painting gives some idea of the breadth and depth of McGee’s art practice. The artworks also illustrate the artist’s typically inventive use of materials. “Play Patterns II” echoes the style of his well-known artwork, “Noah’s Ark,” now part of the Detroit Institute of Art’s permanent collection. A pair of small, highly formal relief paintings, hung side by side, deliver a jolt of tactile sensation; the compositions seem to have been formed almost by geological processes rather than by the human hand and mind. “Untitled” (c. 1980s-1990s) has the unstudied gestural feel and palette of a Jackson Pollock, while to its left, “Untitled” (2001) hints at incised, barely visible figures that seem both ancient and modern. McGee felt no need to make art that was either figurative or abstract—he simply followed where the individual composition carried him. Boiled down to its essence, McGee described his process as a journey of discovery: “deconstructing what I think I know… I create art out of shapes that come naturally to me… I have no idea what’s going to come out.” A moderate-sized painting on the gallery wall to the left skates on a knife-edge between the figurative and the purely abstract. “Ancestral Spirits” (2005) can be read as a brown head (or two) imposed over a network of broad black lines that give energy and rhythm to the composition and is reminiscent of Dubuffet, an acknowledged influence for McGee. Across the room, “Play Patterns II” makes highly decorative use of enamel paint dripped and spotted across four large Dibond panels to form the background for the human figures and two snakes dancing across the composition. Cut fabric collage brings dimension to the surface of the painting. Nearby, a large sculpture, “Ritual Icon II,” wants to be a whale’s tooth or some other natural object, decorated and incised with marks that convey maps or symbolic meanings, mysterious and hermetic.

Charles McGee, “Ritual Icon II,” 1993, painted Hydrostone, 67″ x 35 1/2″ x 22 1/2″/Photo: K.A. Letts

Adjacent to “Play Patterns II,” the arrangement of nine small black-and-white sketchbook drawings, from the 1970s through 2020, provides a window on McGee’s creative process. It is impossible to know what lessons he took from his travels to Barcelona in the 1960s, but when looking at these figures it is easy to imagine that the fantastic architecture of Gaudi and the surreal line drawings of Miro could have been liberating for his imagination.

In the second gallery, we find some of McGee’s later work. In Charles McGee’s “Linkage Series” (2017) and in its neighbor “Lineage I” (2017), the kinetic energy of the human body that characterizes many of his previous figurative works is transformed into a purely abstract, pulsing tangle of energy. A particular high point in the second gallery is McGee’s 2005 painting “Nagasaki.” It is tempting to try to fit the painting into some kind of narrative about the catastrophic 1945 event, but this painting reads (at least to me) as a kind of reminiscence. McGee could have been painting a self portrait here, sitting at a table working on one of his later pieces while thinking of a time in his early life.

Charles McGee, “Lineage I,” 2017, ultraviolet inkjet spray system on Dibond, 46 3/4″ x 78 1/2″/Photo: K.A. Letts

Toward the end of McGee’s life, Detroit poet and playwright Bill Harris wrote this:

Charles McGee
Is
on a path
through space-time
along trodden tracks
& least traveled trails
to gain or retain or
explore & explain
the course of action
or succession of events
of his ever-evolving philosophy & identity.

His explorations ended with his passing in 2021, but McGee remains a father figure to many Detroit artists. He himself put it this way, “The community aspect of [art] drives my work. If you look at my imagery, it talks about connectivity, how all of these elements come together.”

“Charles McGee: Time Is Now” is on view at the Shepherd, 1265 Parkview Street, Detroit, Michigan, through July 20.