Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight

The first survey of Joe Overstreet, abstract painter of the Black Arts Movement and forecaster of Afrofuturism

This groundbreaking survey of abstract paintings by Joe Overstreet (1933-2019) recognizes his energizing presence in the Black Arts Movement and situates his socially engaged and spatially challenging work within today's crucial redefinition of the modernist canon. Overstreet's Flight Patterns series, created from 1969 to 1973, is at the center of this book. These intensely colored acrylic-on-canvas works are hung with ropes tethering them to the ceiling, floor, walls--a vital exploration of geometries and free-form installation. In addition, the book includes new studies of Overstreet's shaped canvas constructions of the 1960s and his mammoth Facing the Door of No Return works, quickly painted in a rush of inspiration after his 1992 trip to Senegal and encounter with the embarkation point of Africans shipped for enslavement in the New World. Essays on Overstreet's shaped canvases, Flight Patterns, and the Facing the Door of No Return paintings accompany full-color photographs of the works, and a detailed chronology places Overstreet's career in its time.

Distributed for the Menil Collection

Exhibition Schedule:

The Menil Collection, Houston, TX
(January 24-July 13, 2025)

Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson
(November 1, 2025-January 25, 2026)