David McGee was born in Lockhart, Louisiana, grew up in Detroit, MI, and moved to Texas in the 1980s, where he received his BFA from Prairie View A&M University. 

His work encompasses painting, printmaking, watercolor, and drawing, exploring the interplay between image and text to poignantly situate his practice within larger art historical narratives and social critiques. Humor, care, and thoughtfulness, coupled with an interest in surface, emotion, and drama characterizes a practice that oscillates between abstraction and figuration, and that explores the emotional weights of race, language, signs and signifiers, art history, and the recognition of existence, both individual and collective.

McGee’s recent Tarot Cards series are 160 small works on paper that draw from the art historical canon combined with text referencing the Civil War, highlighting its colonial inceptions, lasting historical and cultural legacies, and ongoing racial and economic reckonings still felt today. As part of the exhibit, 4 large watercolors of Black women dressed in 17th century European Court attire/ Southern antebellum ballgowns, pay homage to the past and present survival strategies employed by these women..

McGee is represented by Inman Gallery in Houston, with solo exhibitions at The Menil Collection, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Museum of African American Culture, The Art Museum of Southeast Texas in Beaumont, , The Galveston Art Center,, and others. Permanent collections, include the Grand Rapids Art Museum,; Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Rhode Island School of Design Museum; and W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University   

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