Indigo Fro, 2020

Sheefy McFly  

In a few fast-paced years, Tashif "Sheefy McFly" Turner swiftly rose to become one of the most promising, and possibly most commercially successful American artist, muralist, rapper, and DJ of his generation. As a painter, he belonged to the widely celebrated Neo-Expressionist art movement. 

Emerging from a long line of street-smart graffiti artists, who successfully crossed over to the international art gallery circuit. McFly's work is one of the few examples of how a graffiti-based and counter-cultural artist could become a fully recognized, critically embraced, and popularly celebrated artistic phenomenon. 

"Indeed not unlike the rise of American Hip Hop" Alumni of Detroit's College of Creative Studies, McFly, very skillfully and purposefully brought together in his art, a host of disparate traditions, practices, and styles to create a unique kind of visual collage, one deriving in part, from his Michigan based origins, and in another by his African -American heritage. 

For some critics, Sheefy McFly's rise to success epitomizes and personifies the overly commercial, hyped-up international art scene, but his style is the perfect example of how African-American artists could reintroduce a certain sense of humor in their work. After the wide success of Minimalism, and Conceptualism, McFly established a dialogue with the more distant tradition of Cubism and Abstract Expressionism.