Charles McGee, 84, has been awarded the Kresge Foundation's first annual Kresge Eminent Artist Award, reports the Detroit Free Press. The $50,000 prize, created by the Troy, Michigan–based foundation as part of its recently announced plan to give $8.8 million to support the arts in southeastern Michigan, recognizes a local artist for outstanding and longstanding contributions to art in Detroit.

McGee is a multi-media artist whose work marries modernist and primitivist aesthetics, as well as abstraction and figuration; his pieces often include bold colors and have a jazzy, rhythmic feel. In 1969, he started an art school for kids and Gallery 7, a cooperative space that was the first gallery in Detroit to show black and white artists side by side. He co-founded the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit in 1978, taught at Eastern Michigan University for 18 years, and still teaches one day a week at the Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center.