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. [1] 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,[2] among other institutions.