GEM

For over four decades, Gerald McGee has stood on the other side of the frame — choosing mats, mounting corners, deciding how someone else's work should meet the wall. "I can bring joy and happiness to my customers," he has said of the craft, "and it can be in someone's home on their walls for the rest of their lives." That instinct, honed across a career built from the bottom up ("what you learn at the bottom is what takes you to the top"), now turns toward his own hand.

McGee's collage and mixed-media work sets vivid, almost overwhelming abundance against quiet, easily-overlooked moments — a street corner, a figure seated alone, a sky caught mid-change. Small hand-lettered fragments surface from within the flowers themselves: I AM YOU. DO YOU SEE ME. The question the framer has spent a lifetime asking on behalf of other artists' work, he now asks in his own.