313 Legends

One of Detroit’s leading abstract painters, Allie McGhee’s career is defined by a body of work that vibrates with energy, rhythm, and color.

Known for his enormous canvases charged with gestural movement, McGhee’s work embodies both Detroit’s jazz pulse and its industrial grit, making him a cornerstone of the city’s visual arts scene – one who has remained loyal to abstraction while infusing it with a distinctly African American spirit.

Harold Neal was one of the most memorable visual storytellers to emerge from Detroit’s early-20th century Black Arts Movement, known for his paintings that were often fiery, mournful, and celebratory—giving a voice to the struggles and triumphs of African Americans in the mid-20th century.

Neal’s work captures both the rage of oppression and the beauty of Black life, cementing his reputation as one of Detroit’s leading artists.

Hughie Lee-Smith is remembered as one of America’s great modernist painters, a man who seamlessly blended surreal landscapes and classical technique with an unflinching eye for alienation and longing.

He became a major force to be reckoned with in mid-20th-century art, and his Detroit years gave him both his foundation and his vision.

At the age of 10, Lee-Smith moved with his mother to Detroit, part of the Great Migration that brought so many Black families north for work.

Detroit was an industrial, rapidly changing city at the time – one full of promise but also prejudice.

Patricia Burnett was born in Brooklyn, New York, to parents who separated when she was young.

Her mother later married a physician who worked at Henry Ford Hospital, and their family moved to Detroit, a place that would have a profound impact on the rest of Patricia’s life.

In 1942, she was named Miss Michigan and went on to become a runner-up in the Miss America pageant that same year, as well as “Miss Congeniality” in a later pageant.

She earned a scholarship to study at the Toledo Museum of Art for four years when she was just twelve years old and started selling her portraits by the time she was fourteen.

She then continued her education at Wayne State University in Detroit and studied abroad at the Instituto Allende in Mexico during a time when portraiture was still dominated by men.

If Detroit is a well-oiled machine, Albert Kahn sketched the blueprint.

Steel and glass were his language, and within it, he told the story of American ambition and the immigrant drive to succeed. 

He did not just build buildings.

He constructed a body for the beating heart that was the Metro.

Diego Rivera did not just paint walls.

Rivera did not just paint walls. 

He crafted revolutions in concrete.

Rivera arrived in Detroit in April 1932 to find the city struggling under the weight of the Great Depression.

It was a time when unemployment was high, factories were closed, and stomachs were empty.

Black smoke hung from the skyline, and the mood was somber and gray.

And yet, out of that bleak canvas stepped Rivera: barrel-chested, defiant, brilliant.

He brought color. 

Meaning.

Fire.

Months later, he would transform the Detroit Institute of Arts into a temple for the working class – and scandalize the city’s elite at the very same time.

As you walk through Detroit, you’ll feel like you’re walking into Charles McGee’s imagination.

His legacy is on freeway overpasses, museum walls, school corridors – and in the quiet disbelief of Detroit students who grew up thinking a career in art was impossible yet necessary.

He never chased fame.

The truth he sought was in form.

Although born just outside the Motor City, McGee paid back the city that molded him in murals, mentorship, and magic.

In a city of factories, foreclosures, and forgotten corners, Tyree Guyton did the unthinkable: He walked away from the 9-to-5 grind, grabbed a paintbrush, and created a gallery in the midst of wasteland.

In abandoned homes, he painted faces.

He stuck shoes to walls, hung dolls from trees, and polka-dotted up an entire block of homes.

Some called it madness.

Others genius.

But no one could deny that it was quintessentially Detroit – raw, revived, and uncompromising.