HOUSTON — On April 5, 1968, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Joe Overstreet started a brand new portray. The piece that may develop into “Justice, Faith, 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 type a kind of protect. Spanning some 7.5 by 16 ft, the huge, 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 acutely 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 various 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 much to show my work in Houston again someday.” That day has lastly come.
Set up view of Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight on the Menil Assortment, Houston. Left to proper: “Untitled” (1967); “Justice, Faith, Hope, and Peace” (1968); “Untitled (Sun Ra series)” (1967) (picture by Sarah Hobson)
Joe Overstreeet: Taking Flight on the Menil Assortment shines a long-overdue highlight on an astonishingly progressive artist who explored the Black expertise in the US by abstraction. All 4 panels of “Justice, Faith, 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 sequence. Visually, the works’ good colours and creative kinds are breathtaking, however a better look reveals deeper messages in regards to the sophisticated political world during which the artist lived.
Born in rural Conehatta, Mississippi, in 1933, Overstreet and his household left the South within the early Nineteen Forties and ultimately 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 era 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.
Set up view of Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight on the Menil Assortment, Houston. Left to proper: “Untitled” (1971); “Mr. and Mrs. Percy” (1970); “Great Mother of All” (1970) (picture by Sarah Hobson)
By the mid-Nineteen Sixties, Overstreet was a distinguished determine within the Black Arts Motion. He created his work “with a message about the time, about Black people and about this country,” he later said (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 needed to forge an alternative choice to the Eurocentric view of portray that continued to dominate American artwork. In 1967, he started constructing elaborate formed canvases, like these of “Justice, Faith, Hope, and Peace,” and deserted stretchers totally simply three years later.
Overstreet is probably 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 kinds resemble kites, sails, flags, or tents that enliven the house with their radiant shade. However rigorously chosen titles like “We Came from There to Get 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 each bit, a number of factors of pressure, brought on by binding and pulling, replicate the acute pressure on Overstreet and plenty of different activists and artists because the Civil Rights motion, Vietnam Struggle, and political unrest within the US intersected within the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s.
Joe Overstreet, “North Star” (1968), acrylic on canvas (© Property of Joe Overstreet/Artist Rights Society (ARS), courtesy Eric Firestone Gallery, New York, picture Jenny Gorman)
“The tension is really key to the comment he’s making about life in the United States in the early 1970s with the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights and Black Power movements,” Dupêcher instructed Hyperallergic on a current tour of the exhibition. Overstreet, who died in 2019, indicated that his Flight Patterns might be positioned in a different way in future installations, in order that they modify barely with every exhibition. However he stipulated that they have to all the time be stretched tight, with at the least 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 vivid gentle and glimmering, dusty environment. However the artist was was particularly impacted by Gorée Island, a significant 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 sequence 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, virtually impressionistic glow. The works are disarmingly lovely, and a few viewers could 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 scale of the once-crowded cells at Gorée, and feathery, repeated marks recommend 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 complicated and gorgeous artwork — is a uncommon and profound privilege.
Joe Overstreet, “Gorée” (1993), oil on canvas (© Property of Joe Overstreet/Artist Rights Society (ARS), courtesy Eric Firestone Gallery, New York, picture Samuel Glass)
Joe Overstreet along with his Flight Patterns, 1972 (courtesy Menil Archives, The Menil Assortment, Houston, picture Hickey-Robertson, Houston)
Set up view of Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight on the Menil Assortment, Houston. Left: “Man and Woman Came from a Reed” (1971); proper: “Free Direction” (1971) (picture by Sarah Hobson)
Set up view of Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight on the Menil Assortment, Houston. Left to proper: “Baobab and Fish” (1993); “Kernel” (1993); “Exit Dust” (1993) (picture by Sarah Hobson)
Joe Overstreeet: Taking Flight continues on the Menil Assortment (1533 Sul Ross Road, Houston, Texas) by July 13. The exhibition was curated by Natalie Dupêcher in collaboration with the artist’s property.
Editor’s Word: Hyperallergic’s customary picture coverage is to run pictures taken by our reviewers to authentically characterize their expertise. An exception was made on this assessment as a result of venue’s restrictions on pictures.
