HOUSTON — On April 5, 1968, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Joe Overstreet started a brand new portray. The piece that might turn out to be “Justice, Religion, Hope, and Peace” (1968) takes its title from King’s impassioned phrases, which Overstreet interprets as colliding angles, target-like rings, and diamond-shaped central panels, diverging from the oblong image airplane to kind a type of defend. Spanning some 7.5 by 16 toes, the large, four-paneled work emits an explosive sense of stress and upheaval that displays the second of its creation.
Two years later, the portray’s two central panels had been despatched from Overstreet’s New York studio to Houston for a gaggle present organized by Dominique and John de Menil, socially aware artwork patrons and future founders of the Menil Assortment. The couple invited Overstreet to Houston once more in 1972 for 2 solo exhibitions and bought quite a lot of his works. However the two panels from his 1968 portray had been by no means proven within the metropolis and remained in storage till the artist requested for his or her return almost 10 years later. In his alternate with Dominique (John de Menil died in 1973), Overstreet wrote that he’d “like very a lot to point out my work in Houston once more sometime.” That day has lastly come.
Joe Overstreeet: Taking Flight on the Menil Assortment shines a long-overdue highlight on an astonishingly revolutionary artist who explored the Black expertise in the US by means of abstraction. All 4 panels of “Justice, Religion, Hope, and Peace” have been reunited for the exhibition. Thoughtfully curated by Natalie Dupêcher, the present additionally options items from three of the artist’s main collection. Visually, the works’ sensible colours and creative types are breathtaking, however a more in-depth look reveals deeper messages in regards to the sophisticated political world through which the artist lived.
Born in rural Conehatta, Mississippi, in 1933, Overstreet and his household left the South within the early Nineteen Forties and finally settled in Berkeley, California. The artist joined the US Service provider Marine earlier than establishing his first studio in San Francisco, the place Beat poetry, jazz music, and the artist Sargent Johnson had been formative influences. A transfer to the Higher West Aspect of New York Metropolis in 1958 launched him to an older technology of painters like Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, and in 1960, Overstreet joined Ellsworth Ausby, Solar Ra, and different members of the colourful Black arts and music scene on the town’s Decrease East Aspect.
By the mid-Nineteen Sixties, Overstreet was a distinguished determine within the Black Arts Motion. He created his work “with a message in regards to the time, about Black individuals and about this nation,” he later acknowledged (quoted within the exhibition catalog). A elementary a part of his mission was to interrupt freed from the flat, rectangular image airplane that had characterised a lot of Western artwork historical past; he wished to forge a substitute for the Eurocentric view of portray that continued to dominate American artwork. In 1967, he started constructing elaborate formed canvases, like these of “Justice, Religion, Hope, and Peace,” and deserted stretchers fully simply three years later.
Overstreet is maybe finest recognized for his Flight Patterns works, composed of unstretched painted and stained canvas suspended mid-air by ropes anchored to the gallery partitions, flooring, and ceiling. The dazzling, seemingly airborne types resemble kites, sails, flags, or tents that enliven the area with their radiant shade. However rigorously chosen titles like “We Got here from There to Get Right here” (1970) and noose-like knots — an intentional reference to the historical past of race-based lynchings in the US — allude to extra pertinent points in American society. In every bit, a number of factors of pressure, attributable to binding and pulling, replicate the acute pressure on Overstreet and lots of different activists and artists because the Civil Rights motion, Vietnam Warfare, and political unrest within the US intersected within the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s.
“The strain is absolutely key to the remark he’s making about life in the US within the early Seventies with the Vietnam Warfare and the Civil Rights and Black Energy actions,” Dupêcher advised Hyperallergic on a latest tour of the exhibition. Overstreet, who died in 2019, indicated that his Flight Patterns could possibly be positioned in another way in future installations, in order that they alter barely with every exhibition. However he stipulated that they need to all the time be stretched tight, with no less than one noose tied to each piece.
The ultimate group of works on view emerged from Overstreet’s pivotal journey to Senegal in 1992. Visiting the nation for a gaggle exhibition and biennial, he was impressed by its vibrant gentle and glimmering, dusty environment. However the artist was was particularly impacted by Gorée Island, a serious outpost of the transatlantic slave commerce for over 300 years. A visit to a cell block often known as the Maison des esclaves, or Home of Slaves, prompted him to start work on a brand new collection of wall-sized work shortly after his return to New York.
Overstreet’s Senegal items immerse the viewer in lush layers of pastel oil paint and beeswax that give off a quiet, nearly impressionistic glow. The works are disarmingly lovely, and a few viewers might solely expertise them as such — titles reference Gorée subtly, and the Menil doesn’t embrace didactic wall texts in its galleries. However, like Flight Patterns, these works make the most of the pleasures of paint and shade to reply to deep ache. Every 10-by-12-foot portray is modeled on the dimensions of the once-crowded cells at Gorée, and feathery, repeated marks counsel footsteps pacing throughout the canvases. These works haven’t been displayed publicly for almost 30 years, so seeing them — together with a lot of Overstreet’s advanced and beautiful artwork — is a uncommon and profound privilege.
Joe Overstreeet: Taking Flight continues at the Menil Assortment (1533 Sul Ross Road, Houston, Texas) by means of July 13. The exhibition was curated by Natalie Dupêcher in collaboration with the artist’s property.
Editor’s Word: Hyperallergic’s commonplace picture coverage is to run pictures taken by our reviewers to authentically characterize their expertise. An exception was made on this evaluation because of the venue’s restrictions on pictures.
