ADAA: The Art Show 2024: David McGee: Avenging Angels
For the 2024 edition of The Art Show, Inman Gallery is pleased to present a solo booth of work by Houston-based artist David McGee. Sponsored by the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA), The Art Show is presented at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City, October 29 – November 2, 2024.
Installed in the booth are selections from McGee's Avenging Angels portrait series. Working primarily in watercolor –with supplementary interventions in graphite and colored pencil– McGee presents the viewer with a cast of empowered women who take matters into their own hands as agents of their own existence. Armed and dressed for high society, the women known as the Avenging Angels pay homage to the strategies Black women implement to survive and flourish, past and present.
ACCOMPANYING ESSAY BY STANFORD CARPENTER, PhD:
David McGee Avenging Angels and Other Blaxploitation Lullabies
Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Ave
New York, NY 10065
Booth D7
Benefit Preview: Tuesday, October 29, 2024
Fair Dates: Wednesday, October 30 – Saturday, November 2, 2024
Inman Gallery presents selections from David McGee's Avenging Angels portrait series. Armed and dressed for high society, the women are accompanied by birds, fruits, and butterflies: symbols of messengers, temptations, and ancestral spirits. A force to be reckoned with, the Avenging Angels pay homage to the strategies Black women implement to survive and flourish.
Taking inspiration from art history, Shakespearean theatre and popular culture (specifically 1970s Blaxploitation films), McGee depicts these women in nonspecific settings infused with natural elements to emphasize a direct connection with the natural world: it is in this space where they strategize their own way forward. McGee presents the viewer with a cast of empowered women who take matters into their own hands to create or craft their own existence.
David McGee (b. 1962, Lockhart, Louisiana) was raised in Detroit, Michigan and moved to Texas in the 1980s, where he established a multifaceted practice that examines the tangled narratives of art history, the mutable nature of language, and the politics of race and class.
His debut institutional survey, David McGee: The Griot and the Nightingale will open Fall 2025 at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art (Charlotte, NC), organized by Katia Zavistovski, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.
McGee lives and works in Houston, Texas.
