The Wall Street Journal: "‘Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight’ Review: Precision and Progression at the Menil Collection"

A question for a hypothetical curatorial seminar in “Reconciling Abstraction and Social Comment in Contemporary American Painting”: What to make of the African-American abstract painter Joe Overstreet? The exhibition “Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight,” at the Menil Collection in Houston, is at first glance—and more so after longer visual consideration without reading explanatory labels—a show of dazzlingly inventive abstraction, with both convincing and somewhat tenuous visual connections to the situation of black people in American society. (Organized by associate curator Natalie Dupêcher, the show continues through July 13 before traveling to the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson.) The exhibition features such gracefully daring work as “Free Direction” (1971), a 10-foot-wide semi-sculpture, in purple and black, of squares and parallelograms in tentlike tension. 

Overstreet’s family left his birthplace of Conehatta, Miss., about 60 miles east of Jackson, in the early 1940s. His father was a mason, and it’s a reasonable conjecture that an early exposure to construction stayed with Overstreet (1933-2019), and helped prompt the sculptural quality of his mature painting. The family moved around—five times between 1941 and 1946—before settling in Berkeley, Calif. Overstreet graduated from Oakland Technical High School and began studying art, first at a community college and then at the California School of Fine Arts (which later became the San Francisco Art Institute). He lived in North Beach, hung out with the Beats, and published a journal, Beatitudes Magazine; he also showed his art in jazz clubs and teahouses. Overstreet spent 1955 to 1957 in Los Angeles working as an animator for Disney, before decamping for New York with the Beat poet Bob Kaufman in 1958. There—like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns—he designed store-window displays for a living. 

In the early 1960s Overstreet became the art director for the Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School, founded in Harlem by the poet and playwright LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka). After a university visiting-artist stint in northern California from 1970 to 1973, he returned to New York and there met his future wife, Corrine Jennings, a fellow artist. Along with the writer Samuel C. Floyd, they founded Kenkeleba House in the East Village. The center—which takes its name from an African healing plant—was also an exhibition space for artists of color (David Hammons and Norman Lewis both showed there) and is still active today. Throughout this period dedicated to community work, and perhaps in good part because of it, Overstreet developed into a significant and original abstract artist.

A major precursor to Overstreet’s mature art—as emphasized by its stunning curtain-raiser position in the exhibition—is “Justice, Faith, Hope, and Peace” (1968). He began the 16-foot-wide, four-panel painting in the immediate aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. While its symmetry and bold colors refer energetically to African art, it’s clearly more of a late modernist Western abstraction. That said, the mix of the two styles is pleasurably potent. Overstreet began making complicated, non-rectangular stretchers for his paintings in 1967. Later he said that “by 1970, I had broken free from notions that paintings had to be on the wall in rectangular shapes.” At first, the results were abstractions on symmetrically shaped formats, such as the brilliantly inclusive “HooDoo Mandala” (1970), a work over 7 feet square. Yes, there is messaging of a sort in the chroma—brown skin tones, sunrise pinks, and a crisp, knowing center of blue and white—but the overall tension between pleasantly ordered colors and the physical strain among the mounting ropes on all sides make the painting memorable. Just a year later, Overstreet extended (I refuse to say “stretched”) his constructivist impulse in the 12-foot-wide, tent-like painting “Saint Expedite I.” He left behind no detailed instructions as to how to show such works, but had directed exhibitors to include some hangman’s knots—subtle but telling references to lynchings—when fixing them to the walls and floor. 

A final gallery is devoted to Overstreet’s late monumental abstract paintings, most of them unseen in an exhibition since Overstreet showed them in his own art space in 1993. Large, flat rectangles, they look like pale versions of the resurrected Impressionism of, among others, Jean-Paul Riopelle. After the punchy, somewhat symbolic works in the previous rooms, they seem at first a bit of a letdown, but slow looking reveals the sensitivity lurking in his far less confrontational colors. A few of the paintings have subtle hints at proportions from the golden section (aka the golden ratio), and one—“Cross Currents” (1993)—even includes an obvious Fibonacci spiral (the kind derived from the golden section) in the center of a miasma of pale, grayed-out color.

“Taking Flight,” the exhibition’s subtitle, refers to Overstreet’s progression from emblematic but physically rigid formats to “HooDoo Mandala” and “Saint Expedite I.” It could also indicate, perhaps unintentionally, his leaving behind an early political ferocity in such Pop-ish paintings as “The New Jemima” (1964), a giant polychrome box that the Menil owns but does not include in this exhibition, and in which the pancake-mix figure cuts loose with a machine gun and a grenade. The work’s omission deprives the show of some editorial clout, but its absence also gives us a clearer vision of Overstreet’s significance as an abstract painter.

Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight 
Menil Collection, through July 13