How to add a string as the artist in matplotlib legend?

I don’t think there’s a legend handler for text (see the list of available ones here). But you can implement your own custom legend handler. Here I’ll just modify the example at the above link:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.text as mpl_text

class AnyObject(object):
    def __init__(self, text, color):
        self.my_text = text
        self.my_color = color

class AnyObjectHandler(object):
    def legend_artist(self, legend, orig_handle, fontsize, handlebox):
        print orig_handle
        x0, y0 = handlebox.xdescent, handlebox.ydescent
        width, height = handlebox.width, handlebox.height
        patch = mpl_text.Text(x=0, y=0, text=orig_handle.my_text, color=orig_handle.my_color, verticalalignment=u'baseline', 
                                horizontalalignment=u'left', multialignment=None, 
                                fontproperties=None, rotation=45, linespacing=None, 
                                rotation_mode=None)
        handlebox.add_artist(patch)
        return patch

obj_0 = AnyObject("A", "purple")
obj_1 = AnyObject("B", "green")

plt.legend([obj_0, obj_1], ['Model Name A', 'Model Name B'],
           handler_map={obj_0:AnyObjectHandler(), obj_1:AnyObjectHandler()})

plt.show()