Sculptor and educator Charles McGill, who is best known for repurposing vintage golf bags by creating assemblages with their tempered plastic, steel, leather, vinyl, and hardware, died on Sunday, July 9, near his home in Peekskill, New York. The fifty-three-year-old artist’s passing was confirmed by Pavel Zoubok Gallery.

“I find the golf bag to be a very political object due to its historical associations with class . . . and racial injustice . . . It is both an object and subject that lends itself well to found object abstractions and assemblages that address these well-chronicled complexities,” McGill said.

McGill was originally trained as a figurative painter. He first studied at the School of Visual Arts and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture before earning his master’s degree in fine arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1989. McGill’s works have been exhibited at a variety of institutions, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, and the Norton Museum of Art. He received a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in 2014 and the Joan Mitchell Foundation in 2015. In 2016, the Boca Raton Museum of Art staged his first solo museum exhibition, “Front Line, Back Nine,” curated by Kathleen Goncharov.