If you’ve ever seen a dinosaur in a museum, you just might know Charlie McGrady’s work. From the late Eighties to the early Aughts, the sculptor and conceptual artist worked alongside paleontologists to bring paradigm-shifting research to life. McGrady and his team at CM Studio created more than a thousand lifelike dinosaur sculptures and dozens of commercial exhibits for clients like The Discovery Channel, The Field Museum in Chicago, and Tokyo’s Museum of Natural History. 

McGrady’s art is as informed by surrealism as it is by Medieval iconography. He suggests that the powerful institutions of our day employ their own modern iconographies to manipulate the masses into compliance. In McGrady’s view, we are forced into meaninglessness and use mindlessness to cope. The entertainment industry, the drug war, the art scene, the church, economic giants—each behemoth weaves its own set of symbols into a narrative it wields against the average person’s malleable mind. McGrady’s work examines the many holy and unholy diversions we humans seek, begging us to confront our own impending extinction. 

Born in 1952 in Gillespie, Illinois, McGrady spent several years in New York City playing jazz, making art, and working as an accountant before he returned to Gillespie, where he resides today. He is at work on a series of sixteen large-format altars (after The Ghent Altarpiece), each a critique of a discrete institution, the first of which is Religion.

“Humans are the means by which the universe perceives itself.”

Charlie McGrady