Exploring Joe Overstreet's Menil Collection Exhibition - A Captivating Art Experience Not to Be Missed in 2022

April 4, 1968: A day of sorrow gripped the nation following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. by a white supremacist. The day after, painter Joe Overstreet began work on Justice, Faith, Hope, and Peace (1968), a four-panel masterpiece that encapsulated the mood of the moment, this very instant of our troubled, divided history.

Two diamond-shaped panels, awash in raucous shades of red and orange, sit at the heart of the painting like targets amid a storm; they're flanked by a pair of rectangular panels, their pointed cerulean forms shattered by jagged edges like shards of a shattered dream. Despite its vibrant colors, the painting pulses with the unease and raw energy of an impending, brutal clash.

Raw and Unfiltered

Justice, Faith, Hope, and Peace finds its home at the Menil Collection in Houston, heading up a long-overdue retrospective of this overlooked artist. The 30 or so paintings in the exhibition are variations on a theme: They propose abstraction as a path to liberation, a means to express the calamity and the hope, the pain and the progress of a people in the face of injustice.

None of these paintings back down from a challenge. During the mid-1960s, when many artists were abandoning traditional square and rectangular formats, Overstreet pushed his paintings to the extreme, crafting custom stretchers to give his works an electric, unhinged shape. By the late '60s, he had torn his paintings from the confines of the wall, hanging them with cotton rope. In the 90s, in an era when painting was thought to be a spent force, killed off by Conceptualism and appropriation art, Overstreet reemerged with monumentally scaled abstractions.

This ain't your grandma's abstract art. Overstreet's work may look good on the eyes, but it delivers the hard-hitting commentary it promises, the barbs lying beneath its dazzling, brilliant surface.

A Painting on the Edge

Look closely at those strung-up, unstretched paintings from the late '60s and '70s. Overstreet, who died in 2019, didn't leave specific installation instructions for his pieces. That makes the curators' decision to adopt an improvisational approach here all the more appropriate, with certain sections draping loosely while others are taut as a guitar string, resembling a noose, hung from the rafters. They did, however, adhere to Overstreet's specific directives to use cotton rope and to incorporate hangman's knots in places when binding work to the floor and walls.

There can be no denying it: These paintings blast through the fog of racism and enslavement, even when they don't directly depict those forms of violence. That is crystal clear in a work like We Came from There to Get Here (1970), the only unstretched canvas here that verges on figuration. A reddish-brown, pulsating human figure is barely discernible amid the patchwork of hues, each square painted in a different color, like the striped clothing of a lynching victim.

Why depict such darkness with such a vibrant palette of color? For Overstreet, painting offered a means to portray Black history without being weighed down by dreary gloom or intentionally ignoring the violence of the past. In order to truly be free, he believed, one must acknowledge and process the darkness that came before. This middle ground, an electric blend of vibrant abstraction and bitter political commentary, became Overstreet's trademark.

Born in the Shadows

Born in 1933 in the rural Mississippi town of Conehatta, Overstreet's life was shaped by the shadows of Jim Crow. His family escaped to the North during the 40s as part of the Great Migration, finally settling in Berkeley, California around 1945. As an adult, Overstreet traveled the country, enlisting in the Marines, taking up residence in San Francisco, and eventually moving to New York in 1958. Later, he would call his unstretched canvases "portable works," a reflection of his nomadic upbringing.

In New York, Overstreet found himself in the midst of the Abstract Expressionist movement, which had gained institutional acceptance. But Overstreet wasn't a follower; instead, he sought his own unique voice, sticking with abstraction despite the rise of more outré styles. His unstretched canvases of the '70s, the "Flight Patterns," were implicit rejections of Minimalism, a movement whose adherents were mostly white sculptors producing work that appeared apolitical.

Overstreet's Free Direction (1971) is a mauve canvas that looks like a hexahedron that's been twisted and contorted. Overstreet has here taken the cube, a symbol of Minimalism, and torn it apart. In two other works on view at the Menil, Overstreet revisits those cubes, this time painting them in the colors of the Pan-African flag, a political statement that underscored the divisive nature of his work.

When Art Meets Activism

All of Overstreet's paintings can be read as acts of dissent, and the ones in the Menil exhibition certainly typify his radical individualism. But the Menil show, like many museum exhibitions, can be limiting in its scope. The New Jemima (1964), Overstreet's most famous work, is nowhere to be found here, though the Menil does own the painting. Similarly, Strange Fruit, a haunting 1964 painting featuring a pair of dangling legs alluding to a photograph of lynched men, is also conspicuously absent.

Perhaps even more glaringly absent is any mention of Overstreet's work for Kenkeleba House, a New York nonprofit that he co-founded in 1974 with his partner, Corrine Jennings, and Samuel C. Floyd. Kenkeleba House has been instrumental in uplifting artists of color who have been neglected by the mainstream. Overstreet himself took a decade-long hiatus from his art practice to focus on Kenkeleba House, but that crucial chapter of his career is barely acknowledged in the Menil show, which, like most museum shows, eschews didactics.

Kenkeleba House is still alive and well, continuing Overstreet's vital work. The spirit of his activism, his dedication to the power and the potential of art as a tool for change, lives on. And as for Overstreet's monumental abstractions, there's something about them that goes beyond mere aesthetic pleasure. They're not just pretty; they've got a message, one that's as relevant now as it was 50 years ago. So maybe it's time to listen.

The painting Justice, Faith, Hope, and Peace by artist Joe Overstreet is the centerpiece of a retrospective exhibition at the Menil Collection, providing a long-overdue acknowledgement of his significant contributions to abstract art.
Overstreet's paintings, such as Justice, Faith, Hope, and Peace, explore abstraction as a means of expressing the struggles and hopes of those facing injustice, delivering a hard-hitting commentary beneath their vibrant and captivating surface.
In an era when traditional square and rectangular formats were being abandoned by many artists, Overstreet crafted custom stretchers to give his works an electric and unconventional shape, challenging the conventions of the art world.
Overstreet's late '60s and '70s paintings, such as We Came from There to Get Here, push the boundaries of traditional abstraction with their improvisational installations, symbolic imagery, and vivid color palette, offering a powerful and political commentary on the Black experience in America.
Among his many achievements, Overstreet co-founded Kenkeleba House, a nonprofit dedicated to uplifting artists of colour who have been overlooked by the mainstream, epitomizing his dedication to using art as a tool for social change and providing a platform for underrepresented voices in the art world.