BIOGRAPHY

In a few fast-paced years, Tashif “Sheefy McFly” Turner has swiftly risen to become one of the most promising, and possibly most successful American artists, muralists, rappers and DJs of his generation. As a painter, he belongs to the widely Neo-Expressionist art movement. He emerges from a long line of street-smart graffiti artists, who successfully crossed over to the international gallery circuit. 

McFly’s work is one of the few examples of how a graffiti-based and counter-cultural artist can become a fully recognized, critically embraced, and popularly celebrated artistic phenomenon. An alumnus of Detroit’s College for Creative Studies, Sheefy very skillfully and purposefully brings 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 can reintroduce a certain sense of humor in their work. After the wide success of Minimalism, and Conceptualism, McFly has established a dialogue with the more distant tradition of Cubism and Abstract Expressionism.