Charlotte’s Bechtler Museum of Modern Art is entering the final month of 'David McGee: The Griot and the Nightingale', a comprehensive survey of the artist’s career that remains on view through Aug. 23, 2026. The exhibition, presented in the museum’s 4th Floor Gallery, brings together more than 100 paintings and works on paper spanning the early 1990s to the present.
The museum describes the show as McGee’s first major museum survey. According to the exhibition page, it gathers rarely exhibited early work alongside selections from the artist’s most recent series, presenting works that had not previously been seen together. The installation is framed as a study of the formal strategies and recurring motifs that shape McGee’s practice across three decades.
McGee’s work, as outlined by the museum, examines narratives of art history, the fluid nature of language, and the politics of race and class. The exhibition title points to two guiding ideas. The griot, in West African tradition, is a storyteller who preserves communal memory through word and song; the nightingale refers to a poetic symbol of lyric expression and renewal. The museum says McGee’s practice draws on visual, literary, musical and pop-culture references to question dominant narratives and explore systems of representation.
Music is built into the exhibition’s presentation through three playlists. One is a personal selection by McGee featuring music that helped shape his creative vision. Another comes from Black Notes Project, which approaches his paintings through the lens of Black musical traditions and shared aesthetic vocabularies. The third, 'Urban Dreads / Oracles', is an original score by composer Chris Becker inspired by McGee’s 'Urban Dreads' and 'Oracles' series.
The museum says McGee’s own playlist moves among Nina Simone, John Coltrane, Maria Callas and Kendrick Lamar, using jazz, classical music, blues and hip-hop to extend the emotional and narrative range of the exhibition. The Black Notes Project companion frames sound as a parallel archive of history, memory and cultural knowledge, while Becker’s commissioned composition layers urban ambience, bells, birdsong, vinyl textures and fragments of the artist’s voice. The credits note that the score was released Feb. 6, 2026, and was composed, recorded and mixed by Becker, with Patrick Moore on cello, David McGee on voice and Douglas Henderson mastering.
An exhibition-related event is scheduled for Aug. 19, 2026, when the Bechtler will host a screening of 'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly' followed by an artist talk during the show’s closing week. The exhibition is supported by donors of the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art Director’s Circle.
As the McGee survey nears its close, the museum is also looking ahead to 'Making an Impression: Pioneering Latin American Printmakers', scheduled for Sept. 26, 2026, through Feb. 1, 2027, in the same gallery. That exhibition will feature works by Rufino Tamayo, Jesús Rafael Soto, Regina Silveira and Analia Saban and will examine printmaking as a site of material and perceptual experimentation.
