A modern griot at the Bechtler

This review by longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman was published by The Charlotte Ledger on June 8, 2026. You can find out more about The Charlotte Ledger’s commitment to smart local news and information and sign up for our newsletter for free here. Ledger subscribers can add the Toppman on the Arts newsletter on their “My Account” page.

by Lawrence Toppman

The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art has embedded QR codes into wall texts for “David McGee: The Griot and the Nightingale.” Click on them, and you’ll hear music that McGee or Black Notes Project chose to accompany the show. I stopped at “Lush Life,” one of the big oil paintings in McGee’s first major museum survey, and opened the first number on his playlist.

Coleman Hawkins’ 1939 “Body and Soul” flowed through my phone, and the exhibit came into perspective. Like Hawkins, McGee filters classic material through his own endless imagination. He states his theme, then riffs on it. He pays homage to masters who came before him, then flies off to his own universe.

The Bechtler predicts “Griot,” which runs through Aug. 23, will top all attendance records in the post-Covid era, and I see why. It’s a witty, thought-provoking, beautifully executed collection from the last three decades of work by the 64-year-old McGee, who explores every topic from his Louisiana roots to 300 years of art history. I can’t capture the full sense of it in one brief essay, so I’m going to blaze through some impressions.

McGee’s most obvious self-portrait is “Snake Baby,” where he appears in African face paint and headdress with a rattlesnake around his neck for protection; he got that nickname when his mama escaped a viper bite on a Louisiana farm. McGee’s a bruised and perhaps repentant celebrant, still holding a wine glass, in the Caravaggio-inspired “The End of Summer.”

Yet he also appears in “Lush Life” wearing a “THUG” tattoo and a turban — a tribute to Jacques-Louis David’s painting “The Death of Marat” — and clutching a paper that reads “A Love Supreme,” in honor of John Coltrane. The painting’s title sends us to the Billy Strayhorn song, where the singer declares, “I'll live a lush life/In some small dive/And there I'll be/While I rot with the rest/Of those whose lives are lonely, too.”

If there’s such a thing as a stream-of-consciousness wall, this is it: 120 small rectangles, casually but not carelessly set down, of images that range from “Liberty” (George Washington, face obscured Magritte-style by a lime) to “Colonialism” (an erect golden phallus) to “Cotton,” with bolls growing out of what looks like a KKK hood.

Some of these are facile, some deep. Some alter our perceptions. “Mandingo,” a word that took on offensive sexual connotations in America, goes back to its original meaning — a people from the Upper Niger Valley of West Africa — via McGee’s dignified sketch of a thoughtful Black man.

This multi-faceted guy shows up in certain works as a commentator on the subjects displayed. He can be contemplative, angry, amused — it’s hard to interpret a chimp’s grimace — or glum. In “Dumb Love,” at the foot of a Picasso-esque woman, he’s weeping, colored green (with envy?) and wearing a dunce cap that reads “DUMB.” Are women unattainable to McGee, who feels foolish in their presence? Or does he feel overawed, made inadequate by Picasso’s talent?

Sometimes the chimp wields a paintbrush, sometimes a knife, sometimes a medallion that suggests a prize. He could be a “signifying monkey,” the shrewd trickster adapted from Yoruba mythology. Or he could imply that Americans expect assimilated Blacks to “ape” Caucasians. The 1997 portrait “American Painter” shows a Black West African figurine, paintbrush in hand, covered in whitewash from his firmly planted feet to the top of his marcelled hair.

I laughed aloud at “Socialite in Spring,” a John Singer Sargent-style portrait of a female in white looking over her shoulder; here she’s a cow with a frog, perhaps a prince under a curse, perched on her head. The delightful “Dali” conflates talented eccentrics, connecting mustachioed artist Salvador Dali and feather-haired funkmaster George Clinton (a Kannapolis native, by the way).

“Dew Drop Inn,” the title itself a pun, presents a Cezanne-themed pair of apples and slices of fruit on a brown table. Are those seeds lying among them? Don’t think so; these capsule shapes look like drugs. “Ceci n’est pas un pipe” bears the same name as Magritte’s famous portrait of a pipe, its title reminding us not to confuse images with reality. But in this case, the subjects are a crackpipe and a hookah!

Don’t miss “The Wastelands,” a series of torrid, nearly abstract oils that seem to be in anguished motion and (like T.S. Eliot’s poem) address spiritual dislocation and the absence of meaning in life. In these, a man in his early 30s searches for purpose.

Or the nine powerful paintings in “Avenging Angels and Shadow Men.” Strong women hold themselves proudly but warily, wearing European court dress (a nod to Velasquez, whom McGee admires) while standing among birds, fruit and leaves, traditional symbols of fecundity. The men, by contrast, are a smiling railway porter with a washed-out face and ironic angels’ wings, and a soldier in Union Army blue next to a tall African drum. He’s rallying to the “Drum Call” of the title — but to whose drum?

I’m about out of space. Just look at everything.

“Griot” is obvious: a West African storyteller who interprets history, often with a moral point of view, through narratives. I imagine “Nightingale” goes back to Philomela; in Roman mythology, she was raped by her sister's husband, who cut out her tongue to prevent her from identifying him. The gods changed her into a nightingale, whose song became a lament.

Philomela turns up in Eliot’s poem, where she “filled all the desert with inviolable voice.” In Nature, however, the female nightingale is mute, and only the male sings. So McGee the nightingale makes beauty out of the pain and grief of his people, like the fabled bird.

Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for the Charlotte Ledger — look for his reviews several times each month in the Charlotte Ledger.