The Brooklyn Rail: "Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight"

Until his final years, Joe Overstreet (1933–2019) worked at Kenkeleba House, an East Village arts organization providing a gallery and studios, which he founded in 1974 with his future wife, curator and historian Corrine Jennings, and writer Samuel C. Floyd. I was fortunate to once visit Kenkeleba House with artist David Reed and witness both Overstreet’s studio and the extensive and impressive archive of work by Black American artists collected and housed at the institution. Knowing this background, it was thrilling to encounter the current exhibition, Taking Flight, at the Menil Collection and see Overstreet’s works so dynamically and meticulously presented. Three major series of paintings sequentially unfold across several generously sized gallery spaces. The height of the ceilings also allows for the placement of works in relation to each other in ways that emphasize Overstreet’s pioneering use of space for exhibiting visual art. Color, pattern, and three-dimensionality meld together effortlessly and inventively. Overstreet participated in a signal exhibition of abstract art in Houston’s Black 5th Ward neighborhood in 1971, The De Luxe Show, which was curated by Peter Bradley at the invitation of John de Menil. It exemplified the equality of formal accomplishment by Black artists and their more exalted and rewarded white contemporaries, at a time when Black Americans were protesting social and political inequalities.

The first series of paintings presented here are shaped canvases from the 1960s. Rectilinear formats are opened up and extended following the cues of patterned compositions. At the same time frontal and laterally disjunctive, the paintings take the extension implied by Jackson Pollock’s framing and push on into literal, surrounding space. At the same time, the frontality shares aspects of painted agitprop urban street walls as well as decorated African textiles and objects. Both sources are full of particularized significance beyond their formal strengths, as are Overstreet’s paintings. Often, the political is referenced linguistically in his titles. Take North Star (1968), a work of bright energy that diagonally splinters both paint and physical shape, and recalls the sparkling starlight of the North Star, once significant as a navigating point for Black people in the United States who were moving north at night in secrecy to escape enslavement in the south. Triangulating positive and negative shapes are directional, notched, or protruding: yellows, violets, reds, blues, oranges, and browns explore a range of color that reaches out beyond tasteful or sophisticated norms in much the same way Henri Matisse once explored the colors he found in Tangier—with one important caveat. Tangier and its color was other to Matisse’s cultural and personal history; for Overstreet, the sources of his colors are personal and political.

Mr. and Mrs. Percy (1970) from the “Flight Patterns” series is fully three-dimensional, made from a folded piece of canvas shaped under tension by cotton ropes attached through grommets and anchored to both the floor and ceiling. This plane of material colored by paint staining and raw lines of unpainted canvas continue the “drawing” of the tensile rope across the surface of the canvas, setting up an improbable, poetic Euclidean impossibility. These works dynamically animate the shared space of the viewer in the architecture. Shadow and Light (1971) is vertical in orientation—a shaped, left-leaning, unstretched canvas, roped to and standing away from the wall at uneven depths, the plane of the canvas torquing, and black and grey tones transitioning to beautiful effect. The low contrast evinces the subtle life of shadows and their inevitable relation to, and consequence of, light.

The last of the three series of paintings, “Facing The Door of No Return,” was made after a visit to Senegal, where Overstreet traveled to Dakar, and Gorée Island—the location of an infamous doorway through which captured human beings were trafficked as slaves, never to return to their homes. Upon his arrival back in New York City, the works were made in a relentless and intense working period, and they are monumental, overpowering the viewer with their sheer size and inviting a physical, visual, and haptic experience of painting. The materials—oil and beeswax—are frequently pressed onto the canvas from another surface rather than applied with a brush. This bringing together of two planes, as in printmaking, also elicits identification with mark-making of a direct kind, not one easily controlled with a brush. It puts in mind the viewer’s own experience as an embodied surface that indeed comes into contact with other surfaces. In Exit Dust (1993), the red and yellow color swarms in airy movement, whilst remaining materially present like dust on a road or wall, still visually illusive in pictorial, virtual space. To visit this exhibition is to partake in a playful and deeply serious adventure of exile and reclamation.