Kinship: The Legacy of Gallery 7 is a group exhibition showcasing the cultural legacy of Gallery 7, one of the first art venues in Detroit dedicated to the work of Black artists that was founded and run by Charles McGee from 1969 to 1979.

In 1969, Gloria Whelan, the then director of Detroit Artists Market, asked Charles McGee to curate an exhibition featuring all-Black artists. This was in response to the lack of visibility of Black artists in the broader arts ecosystem of the city. The exhibition, entitled Seven Black Artists, featured works by James Dudley Strickland, Lester Johnson, James King Jr., Robert Murray, James Lee, Harold Neal, Robert J. Stull, and McGee himself. The first gallery exhibition of its kind in Detroit, Seven Black Artists received excellent reviews across the local arts scene. Inspired by the presentation’s success, McGee opened Gallery 7, an exhibition space that represented a new generation of Black artists.

Gallery 7 fostered practitioners working in various styles and championed abstraction to uplift the voices of artists who had long been excluded from the canon. At the time of its founding, the Black Arts Movement was emboldened by the convergence of the civil rights and Black Power movements. The gallery became home not only to exhibitions but also to rich conversations and debates about figurative and abstraction as effective media to express the systemic violence against Black communities.

Kinship: The Legacy of Gallery 7 honors essential art objects that were produced in Detroit, changing the artistic landscape of the city and embracing an abstract sensibility that engages with African cosmologies, ancient forms, and also the development of industry, raw materials, and geometric shapes which led the abstract identity of American art in the 60s and 70s. Kinship: The Legacy of Gallery 7 exhibition presents the works of Lester Johnson, Gilda Snowden, Allie McGhee, Charles McGee, Harold Neal, Robert Stull, Elizabeth Youngblood, and Naomi Dickerson.