David McGee Debuts ‘The Griot & the Nightingale’ at the Bechtler

A griot is a West African storyteller who keeps tribal histories and cultural traditions alive by sharing oral histories through stories or songs. A nightingale is a small, brown bird with a melodious song that’s known as a symbol of poetic inspiration — a migratory muse of sorts.

When Houston-based artist David McGee set out to name his latest exhibition, a collection of more than 100 paintings and drawings spanning his career, he landed on The Griot & the Nightingale to represent the ways he aims to tell stories with flair.

“Sometimes you have to use poetry to enliven the story,” he said. “It’s the same way people use music to tell a story. So, when you’re talking to a tribe about their past and their present you have to enliven those tales.”

McGee’s tales are told on canvas. They range from brilliantly colored pieces to starkly contrasting shapes; from politically charged imagery to personal love letters to his mother.

The artist debuted this survey of his life’s work at The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art on March 14. The exhibit runs until August 23.

The Griot: David McGee builds his story piece by piece

The visuals in David McGee: The Griot & The Nightingale serve as emotional stories to be interpreted by the onlooker.

The artist said he wants patrons to know they are human when they look at his work.

“If the artist is doing his job, it opens up the body to feel vulnerable to all kinds of issues,” McGee said. “I want people to come out. You don’t have to know anything. You don’t have to know art history. You don’t have to know technical things. You just need to look at the images and hopefully like good medicine; you can use it.”

In Charlotte, visitors have been eager to take the medicine. Katia Zavistovski, curator at the Bechtler, said the exhibit has seen a fantastic reception thus far, adding that it’s the most-attended exhibition since the museum started tracking attendance records — and a diverse crowd at that.

“A wide range of audiences are coming to see the show,” she added.

Patrons come off the elevator on the fourth floor of the museum and enter the opening gallery area of the 8,000-square-foot exhibition, where they’re greeted by an overwhelming breadth of colors. The walls are a saturated jewel, dark-teal tone, creating a backdrop for the larger-than-life oil-on-canvas piece “The End of Summer” from the Blue Hour series.

The Blue Hour series uses bright colors contrasted against a dark background — a sort of chiaroscuro approach made famous centuries ago by Caravaggio, who happens to be the subject of an exhibit currently showing across the street at The Mint Museum. The dark backgrounds pop against the dark teal walls.

The first gallery also includes the colorful, Picasso-inspired pieces that fill the eye with saturated colors and the satire of the ape motif. Works like the “Howl” and “Pimps & Whores” from the La bête series cast an ape in the forefront of Cubist figures.

“You know, people start falling into the trap that the monkey is us (African-Americans),” he said. “So, for me, the trickster of the monkey became something that I wanted to use in a series of big paintings based on modernism and originality that the modernist came up with using Africa as an influence.

“I could critique that kind of modernism because if they’re gonna take from Africa and use it for their modernistic impulses, I was gonna take from Africa and use the monkey itself as some kind of revenge factor using, you know, the signifying monkey metaphor of trickster and humor,” he continued.

Zavistovski said the La bête series became one of the anchors of the exhibition.

Another such anchor is a piece called “Corporate Girl Side B,” which depicts a woman wearing a formal gown from the royal court of old, African face paint and boxing gloves.

“The figure is based on a painting by Diego Velasquez from the 17th century, this court portrait,” explained Zavistovski. “But in David’s painting, he paints the woman’s face in traditional African face paint and the female figure is wearing boxing gloves. Even though he is, you know, sort of drawing the source image from the Velasquez painting, he is adding these very powerful contemporary and ancient symbols.”

It’s not all about symbolism in McGee’s work; he sometimes uses words in his painting to get the message across in a more direct manner — especially when it is a politically charged message.

One such instance is in the work “The Homosexual,” which shows actor Lincoln Perry, better known for his vaudevillian persona Stepin Fetchit, cast as a religious cardinal in the context of being a homosexual.

“Images affect people and fashion affects people. What the person is wearing can affect how people perceive the image overall,” McGee said of the work, adding that he was interested by the story of a Black man playing an infamously stereotypical character.

“He did this character which a lot of African-Americans feel is very vulgar because it puts African-Americans in the stereotype,” he said. “I wanted to do a painting about him playing another role. So, I cast him as a religious cardinal in a Stepin Fetchit gaze.

“What it did was critiqued religion, or the perception of religion,” he continued. “It is a critique of race. It critiqued fashion and perception. The whole idea of naming it ‘The Homosexual,’ because the sexuality within a lot of religious sects, you know, that we have to acknowledge.”

The image was not of Perry doing anything vulgar, but the sacred outfit, the missing tooth, the name “The Homosexual” made for visceral reactions from audiences upon its first showing.

The Nightingale: Black Notes Projects creates the sound

The new exhibit pairs McGee’s various collections of artwork (i.e. the griot) with music playlists (i.e. the nightingale) that he helped curate in partnership with the Charlotte-based Black Notes Project and composer Chris Becker.

McGee said the music is meant to help people feel the image.

“I think what you need to do when you look at these paintings is just come in with an open mind,” he said. “Don’t necessarily look for clarity, but just look for qualities of feeling. Let your interior spirit navigate through how you feel about the images.

“And the best way sometimes you can move that along is via music,” he continued. “The mission is not to navigate the paintings or give an explanation for the paintings. It was just something to help you feel, to get you in the mood for your feelings when you’re looking at some of the paintings.”

Museum patrons must scan a QR code posted on the wall entering the exhibit to access the playlist.

Run by Amy Carleton and Michael Kitchen, the Black Notes Project began as a music festival and live concert series that showcases Black American music by mixing genres and blending contemporary hits with symphonic arrangements.

Black Notes has partnered with many of the major art institutions in Charlotte, including the Bechtler, which is how they met Zavia Rudisell, manager of public programs at the time.

Read more: Black Notes Project Uplifts Black Voices in Orchestra, Other Genres (2024)

Rudisell reached out in early 2025 and asked Carleton and Kitchen if they would be interested in planning some programming around the David McGee retrospective, which was already in the works for 2026.

Black Notes Project was given the chance to choose 15 songs inspired by the paintings in the collection. Carleton and Kitchen had the run of the complete exhibition list, dividing the labor while exploring the specific works that spoke to each of them.

Then they put music to the visuals. The curatorial perspective of Carleton came from a “cultural and literary analysis and attempts to situate McGee’s work within broader Black intellectual traditions.”

For comparison, Carleton described Kitchen’s perspective as coming from a “lived experience and spiritual memory that’s embedded in Black music and how that is reflected in the paintings.”

Chris Becker’s sonic contribution came in the creation of original music to accompany the exhibit. He had to hunt for sounds to create a nearly 17-minute soundscape that went with Urban Dreads and Oracles, two separate series from McGee.

The soundscape was split into two chapters: sounds associated with the city and fragmented voice collages. The Urban Dreads series comprises a collection of starkly contrasting black-and-white geometric shapes that remind the viewer of being outside in the city. They express an intensity with a minimalist approach.

According to Becker, McGee was emotionally triggered as a Black man interacting with the black-and-white shapes because it gives a sense of the police. Becker said the sounds of Urban Dreads were meant to intimidate, but there are beautiful moments interspersed in the work, too.

The Oracles series features collages that use fragments of newspapers overlapped with geometric shapes using solid colors. To replicate the fragmented newspapers in the series, Becker used fragments of McGee’s voice speaking over the music to create a sound collage.

The Bechtler curator brings it all together

As with the selection of sounds to accompany the exhibit, the curation process behind the show was a collaborative effort. McGee worked closely with the museum’s curator to select works and placements for the installation, but later credited Zavistoski with making the show happen in the first place.

“I don’t think there would have been another curator who would have put this kind of show together,” he insisted. “I mean, she and the incredible crew. It was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had.”

McGee said he arrived at the installation ready to take full control of the process but was quickly impressed by Zavistoski’s precision and her confidence in knowing what she wanted. He was left pleased with how the show was constructed under her leadership, he said.

The two curated the exhibition in a manner that makes it accessible to all sorts of people. McGee likened the show to a reflection pool.

“That’s the point of a reflecting pool. You look down the well and you see yourself. If you look down the well and you don’t see anybody who looks like you, that’s gonna be a problem,” he said. “So, you’re not gonna go back to the well.”

People who don’t normally come to the museum have been making their way to see David McGee: The Griot and The Nightingale. That’s because they see and hear themselves in the artwork.

It begs the question: How will you see yourself reflected?

David McGee: The Griot and The Nightingale exhibition is open until Aug. 23 on the fourth floor of the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, 420 South Tryon St. Visit the website for more information.