This post was originally published on artnews.com
April 4, 1968, was a day of mourning for nearly every American, with an outpouring of grief following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. by a white supremacist. April 5, 1968, was the day painter Joe Overstreet began work on Justice, Faith, Hope, and Peace (1968), a four-panel shaped canvas that encapsulated the mood of the moment.
Two diamond-shaped panels, with targetlike forms rendered in raucous shades of red and orange, lie at the center of this painting; they are bookended by a pair of rectangular panels painted with symbols that recall blasts, their pointed cerulean forms blown apart by jagged shapes. Despite its cheerful colors, the painting suggests violence and upheaval.
Justice, Faith, Hope, and Peace is aptly placed at the start of a terrific exhibition of Overstreet’s work at the Menil Collection in Houston. It is an overdue survey for the late artist, who has gone overlooked by major museums in this country for far too long. The 30 or so paintings assembled here are variations on a theme: They propose abstraction as a path toward liberation.
None of the paintings here are modest oils on canvas. During the early 1960s, at a time when many artists were departing from traditional square and rectangular formats, Overstreet shaped his canvases even more dramatically than his colleagues, creating custom stretchers that allowed his paintings to exist in gangly geometric shapes. By the late ’60s, he had wrested his paintings from the wall altogether, stringing up his unstretched canvases with cotton rope. In the ’90s, in an era when painting was thought to be long dead, killed off by Conceptualism and appropriation art, Overstreet produced monumentally scaled abstractions.
Overstreet’s paintings do not skimp on visual pleasure. But these works are successful in part because of the barbs that lie beneath their dazzling surfaces.
Look closely at those strung-up paintings from the late ’60s and ’70s. Overstreet, who died in 2019, didn’t provide precise instructions for how to exhibit them, so the Menil exhibition’s curator, Natalie Dupêcher, and her team worked improvisationally, leaving certain parts to hang slack while other parts are stretched taut. They did, however, heed Overstreet’s specific directives to use cotton rope and to utilize hangman’s knots in places when binding work to the floor and walls.
There can be no mistaking it: These paintings are intimately related to lynchings and the specter of enslavement, even when those forms of violence are not represented. That much is apparent in a work like We Came from There to Get Here (1970), the only unstretched canvas here that verges on figuration. A reddish human being can just barely be made out amid the patchwork of painted squares, each rendered in a different hue. In the Menil show, the edges of We Came from There to Get Here are tied to metal grommets bolted to the floor, with the center roped to the ceiling—a method that mirrors other recent presentations of this painting. Seen this way, the painting recalls a hanging.
Why render something so dark with such an exuberant color palette? For one thing, Overstreet seemed set on portraying Black history in a way that was neither overly dour nor entirely ignorant of past violence. To be fully free, Overstreet struck a middle ground, seeding his electric abstractions with bitter political commentary.
He was intimately familiar with all that darkness, having grown up in the Jim Crow–era South. Overstreet was born in 1933 in the rural Mississippi town of Conehatta; his family departed during the ’40s as part of the Great Migration and did not firmly put down roots again until around 1945, when they settled in Berkeley, California. As an adult, Overstreet continued to bounce around, enlisting in the Marines, taking up residence in San Francisco, and ultimately moving to New York in 1958. Later he would call his unstretched canvases “portable works,” a reflection, perhaps, of the itinerant life he led early on.
In New York, Abstract Expressionism had gained institutional acceptance and younger, edgier artists had already moved on for more outré styles. But Overstreet, hardly a conventional thinker by nature, stuck to abstraction, determined to find his own voice. His art would conform to no dominant style—and would even subvert the dominant trends of the moment.
His unstretched canvases of the ’60s and ’70s, a group of works loosely known as the “Flight Patterns,” are implicit rejections of Minimalism, a movement whose exponents were mostly white sculptors who produced work that appeared apolitical. Overstreet’s Free Direction (1971) is a mauve canvas that looks a bit like a hexahedron whose sides have been pulled apart. Overstreet has here taken the cube, a calling card of Minimalism, and literally unfolded it. In two other works on view at the Menil, Overstreet revisits those cubes, this time painting them in black, red, and green—the colors of the Pan-African flag, an explicitly political note that demarcates this work from the sculptures of Richard Serra, Tony Smith, and the like.
All of Overstreet’s paintings can be read as forms of dissent, and the ones at the Menil certainly typify his practice. But it is curious what is left out of the exhibition, whose stated focus on abstraction is limiting. The New Jemima (1964), a freestanding painting in which a racist caricature used to market pancakes is outfitted with a machine gun, is Overstreet’s most famous work. It is owned by the Menil, but it is not on view here. Strange Fruit, a haunting 1964 painting featuring a pair of dangling legs in allusion to a photograph of lynched men, is also conspicuously absent.
Also missing here is an aspect of Overstreet’s career that is harder to survey: his work for Kenkeleba House, a still-operating New York nonprofit that he founded in 1974 with his partner, Corrine Jennings, and Samuel C. Floyd. Kenkeleba House has done the important work of upholding artists of color neglected by the mainstream, from Norman Lewis to Howardena Pindell. He deprioritized his art practice for an entire decade to facilitate Kenkeleba House, but this isn’t so apparent at the Menil show, which, in keeping with the institutional house style, doesn’t feature didactics within the galleries.
Kenkeleba House does feature obliquely in the show in the final gallery, which is given over to Overstreet’s monumental abstractions, most of which haven’t been seen since he showed them at his art space in 1993. Standing before these paintings, I initially felt a pang of disappointment in knowing that Overstreet had traded his more arresting presentation formats for something ordinary: oil on canvas mounted to a wall. Prolonged viewing, however, reveals that there is more at play than meets the eye.
These paintings are as opulent as any that Overstreet produced, with cascades of Renoirish pink strokes. In some cases, the surfaces even appear to undulate, thanks to the inclusion of beeswax, which lent his oil paint a sculptural quality. But beneath all the beauty, there is pain: Overstreet based these works on a visit to Senegal, where he made a pilgrimage to the island of Gorée, formerly home to the largest trading center for enslaved people on the African coast. The paintings are all eight feet tall, roughly the same length as the cells in Gorée’s House of Slaves.
That information is not relayed to viewers at the Menil, aside from a mention in a brochure that accompanies the show, As a result, you may mistake these for gorgeous abstractions. But the truth is that they are that and then some.
Cross Currents (1993), one of the paintings seen here, features a Fibonacci curve visible amid a flurry of grayish strokes. With a name that refers to open water, it isn’t difficult to imagine those strokes as wavelets, the kind that can be seen from the House of Slaves, where views of the ocean once anticipated difficult journeys ahead. The painting is not so dour, however. Overstreet once said that he was interested in the Fibonacci sequence because, to him, it represented “the idea of the curve as reaching a conclusion of how the universe works.” And indeed, in a work like this one, the arc of the universe bends toward justice, even when it might seem otherwise.