Library Street Collective is pleased to present Forms of Witness, a group exhibition opening October 24th, 2026, featuring historic and major works by Charles McGee (1924–2021), Harold Neal (1924–1996), and Gilda Snowden (1954–2014). Bringing together three distinct lineages within Detroit’s artistic heritage, the exhibition examines how their resonant modes of seeing, recording, and interpreting lived experience are translated into visual testimony across abstraction, figuration, and symbolic assemblage.

As key organizers, educators, and institutional builders across Detroit’s cultural history, Neal, McGee, and Snowden actively shaped the platforms that allowed Black artists in the city to build their visibility and autonomy. The exhibition tracks how their practices gave form to active observation, demonstrating how the endeavor of making art can operate as an enduring form of historical deposit and civic stewardship.

The works featured by Neal span nearly the full arc of his five-decade career, tracing an evolution across figuration, still life, and symbolic abstraction. As a founding member of the Contemporary Studio in 1958 and a pivotal voice in Detroit’s Black Arts Movement, Neal’s early paintings—such as Untitled (Two Fish on Table)—exhibit his direct recording of everyday life without ornament. By the 1990s, his compositions turned toward memorial and myth; works like Pisces (1992-95) weave Pan-African iconography, references to jazz icons such as John Coltrane and Wes Montgomery, and key political milestones like the 1995 Million Man March directly into the surface, turning the canvas into a living repository of cultural history.

Snowden, a central figure in Detroit’s contemporary art community who taught at the College for Creative Studies for over thirty years, acted both literally and visually as an archivist of the city’s creative pulse. Known for her dynamic mixed-media practice and atmospheric canvases, Snowden established a visual vocabulary centered on natural forces, weather, and light. Dated works spanning 1993 to 2009—including Tornado (1993), Purple Storm (2003), and Bright Stars @ Night Fire Works I (2006)—channel physical energy through saturated layers of acrylic, encaustic, spray paint, and paper collage. Snowden was remembered by her peers as someone whose paintings and whose presence held the community together—a spirit of connection reflected in her lifelong advocacy for emerging artists, which continued through her service on the Scarab Club’s art advisory committee until her death.

McGee’s legacy lives on through his extensive public murals and sculptures across Detroit, as well as his roles in founding Gallery 7, the Charles McGee School of Art, and co-founding the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit. McGee’s practice treats pattern, texture, and structural geometry as a reflection of nature’s underlying logic and the interconnectedness of human experience. In works like Rapsody in red (c. 1990s) and Primal Striations (2001), as well as layered constructions using dibond, aluminum, and sand on wood panel, McGee connects visual art to musical composition. Titles such as Syncopation (2017) and Spatial Rhythms (2018) underline his engagement with visual jazz and rhythmic systems. The exhibition includes Gateway (2010), a freestanding powder-coated aluminum sculpture that stands as the sole three-dimensional work in the show, bridging the gallery space with McGee’s public, urban footprint.

Together, the works in Forms of Witness illustrate how observation, material process, and civic responsibility are deeply intertwined. Across three distinct bodies of work, Neal, Snowden, and McGee demonstrate that to witness is to record not only what is seen, but what is built, remembered, and passed on. Forms of Witness is on view from October 24, 2026 through January 6, 2027 at Library Street Collective.