The Diving Bell and the Butterfly with David McGee
- Wed, Aug 19
Run Time: 112 min. Release Year: 2007
FREE | REGISTRATION REQUIRED (REGISTER HERE)
Wednesday, August 19, 2026 | 6:30pm
Location: Wells Fargo Auditorium, 430 S. Tryon St., Charlotte, NC 28202.
Synopsis: The remarkable true story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, editor-in-chief of French Elle, who suffers a devastating stroke and is left with locked-in syndrome. Though almost completely paralyzed, he learns to communicate by blinking one eye and, through memory and imagination, discovers a life without boundaries.
*Join us for a post-screening discussion with David McGee. Register here to attend.
David McGee’s (born 1962, Lockhart, LA) work explores the interplay between image and text to poignantly situate his practice within larger art historical narratives and generative social critiques. Humor, care, and thoughtfulness characterize McGee’s practice across media, coupled with an interest in surface, emotion, and drama. Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, his work explores a variety of subjects expanding towards the emotional weights of race, language, signs and signifiers, art history, and the recognition of existence, both individual and collective.
McGee grew up in Detroit, MI, and moved to Texas in the 1980s, where he attended Prairie View A&M University in 1985. He has had solo exhibitions at numerous institutions, including The Menil Collection (Houston, TX), Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (Houston, TX), Museum of African American Culture (Houston, TX), The Art Museum of Southeast Texas (Beaumont, TX), The Gallery at UT Arlington, Texas, The Galveston Art Center (Galveston, TX), and others. His work is featured in numerous permanent collections, including the Grand Rapids Art Museum (Grand Rapids, MI); Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy (Andover, MA); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston, MA); Rhode Island School of Design Museum (Providence, RI); W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University (Cambridge, MA); The Menil Collection (Houston, TX); The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Dallas Museum of Art.
His debut institutional survey, David McGee: The Griot and the Nightingale is currently on view at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, organized by Katia Zavistovski, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, through August 23, 2026. Spanning three decades, his debut institutional survey, brings together over 100 paintings and drawings that trace the artist’s career from the 1990s to the present—from rarely exhibited early work to selections from his most recent series. As the artist’s first major museum survey, the exhibition features works not previously seen together, illuminating the formal strategies and recurring motifs that define his expansive oeuvre.
McGee’s multifaceted practice examines the tangled narratives of art history, the fluid nature of language, and the politics of race and class. Like the griots of West Africa—storytellers who preserve and transmit communal memory through word and song—McGee approaches image and text as living archives. Drawing on a wide range of visual, literary, musical, and pop cultural references, his emotionally resonant work frequently brings these elements into dialogue to question dominant narratives and explore systems of representation. Invoking the nightingale of poetic tradition—a symbol of lyric expression and renewal—his practice is simultaneously rooted in historical consciousness and creates possibilities for new stories taking flight.
Moderator: Dr. de’Angelo Dia serves as Director of Education & Community Engagement at IPH, where he develops film-centered programs, public discussions, workshops, and community partnerships that connect cinema with civic dialogue and creative expression. With more than two decades of experience as an educator, his scholarship and creative practice draw upon Black liberation theology, Gullah cultural traditions, Southern Gothic literature, and comic mythology.
His poetry collections include bifurcation (Union Presbyterian Seminar, 2022), the poetry zine sacred|spaces (Theurgical Studies Press, 2024), and the chapbook nightshade (Bottlecap Press, 2024). His forthcoming manuscript, Salt Water Mystic, is a lyrical exploration of desire and grief through the lens of Southern cosmology.His work has appeared in BLACK BOY Journal, The Skinny Journal, Artists Writing on Liberation, Cru Arts & Culture, and elsewhere.