Joe Overstreet facts for kids

Joe Wesley Overstreet (born June 20, 1933 – died June 4, 2019) was an amazing African-American painter. He was born in Mississippi but spent most of his life creating art in New York City.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, he was part of the Abstract Expressionist art movement. This style uses colors and shapes to show feelings instead of clear pictures.

During the 1960s, when the Civil Rights Movement was happening, Joe Overstreet made powerful art. His paintings like Strange Fruit and The New Jemima showed his thoughts on important social issues. He also helped with the Black Arts Movement, working as an Art Director for a theater in Harlem.

Later, in 1974, he helped start Kenkeleba House, an art gallery and studio in New York. In the 1980s, he started painting more recognizable figures again. His Storyville paintings, for example, bring to mind the lively jazz music scene of New Orleans from the early 1900s. Joe Overstreet's art was inspired by many things, including his own African-American background. His work has been shown in museums and galleries all over the world.

Joe Overstreet's Early Life and Learning

Joe Overstreet was born on June 20, 1933, in Conehatta, Mississippi. His dad was a mason, someone who builds with stone or brick. This work taught Joe about construction and buildings, which later influenced his art.

His hometown was in a rural part of Mississippi. In 1945, it became part of a reservation for the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. Joe's family had lived in Conehatta since 1830, growing trees for wood.

His family moved around a lot, five times between 1941 and 1946. They finally settled in Berkeley, California. In 1951, Joe graduated from Oakland Technical High School. He also worked part-time for the Merchant Marines, which are ships that carry goods.

That same year, Joe began studying art. He went to Contra Costa College and then the California School of Fine Arts (now called the San Francisco Art Institute). He also studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1954. From 1955 to 1957, Joe lived in Los Angeles. He was part of a group of Black artists there and even worked as an animator for Walt Disney Studios.

Moving to New York City

In the 1950s, Joe Overstreet lived in San Francisco and was part of the "Beat Scene." This was a group of writers and artists who explored new ideas. He even published a journal called Beatitudes Magazine from his art studio.

He showed his art in galleries, coffee shops, and jazz clubs around San Francisco. He exhibited alongside other young artists like James Weeks and Richard Diebenkorn.

His studio was close to Sargent Johnson, a sculptor and painter who became his mentor. Johnson believed that African-American artists should use their heritage for inspiration. This idea came from Alain Locke, who was important in the Harlem Renaissance.

In 1958, Overstreet moved to New York City with his friend, the poet Bob Kaufman. He designed store window displays to earn money. He lived and worked in a studio on 85th Street.

In New York, he met Romare Bearden, who greatly inspired him. He also studied painting with Hale Woodruff. Joe felt his true art education came from spending time with famous artists. He hung out at the Cedar Tavern, a popular spot for artists. He met people like Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Hans Hofmann.

Overstreet said that looking at Hofmann's work reminded him of how he naturally saw things. Looking at Jackson Pollock made him think about how he could create art naturally. De Kooning even gave Joe some of his paintings to sell when times were tough. Joe also liked how de Kooning used house painter's brushes. He started using cement trowels to apply paint, like in his painting Big Black (1961).

Art in the 1960s and 1970s

In 1962, Overstreet moved his studio downtown. From 1963 to 1973, he lived in the East Village. From 1970 to 1973, he moved to California to teach at the University of California at Hayward. When he came back to New York in 1974, he met his wife, artist Corrine Jennings.

Joe Overstreet's Art and Career

Early Works: 1950s-1960s

Joe Overstreet's early art from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s combined his interests. He mixed Abstract Expressionism, jazz music, and the difficult history of African Americans. Examples include The Hawk, For Horace Silver (1957) and Big Black (1961).

His painting The New Jemima (1964/1970) changes the well-known image of Aunt Jemima. Instead of a happy servant, Overstreet's Jemima holds a machine gun. This shows her as strong and powerful.

Overstreet remembered that artist Larry Rivers saw the painting around 1970. Rivers suggested he make it bigger for an exhibition at Rice University. Joe made the painting larger, shaping it like a pancake box. This was part of an effort in 1971 to help Rice University become desegregated.

In 1964, Overstreet stopped using oil paints and switched to acrylics. Acrylics dry faster, which let him explore new ideas about space in his art. The painting Strange Fruit (around 1965) is a very important work. It uses rope, a material that appears in many of his paintings over the years.

The title Strange Fruit comes from a famous song by Billie Holiday. The song is about the terrible history of lynchings, where many Black men were killed by hanging. This painting might refer to the murders of three civil rights workers in 1964. In the painting, limp trouser legs hang down, and a rope crosses the canvas. The shapes in the painting suggest powerful symbols like a burning cross.

Other paintings, like One-Eyed Jack and Masks, also refer to the Civil Rights Movement. During this time, Overstreet worked with Amiri Baraka as an Art Director. He designed sets for the Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School in Harlem. In 1963, Overstreet met Ishmael Reed, a writer and activist.

Overstreet was clear about the social and political messages in his art. But he also talked about how the ropes and shapes in his paintings changed space. He was influenced by a book called The Elements of Dynamic Symmetry. This book mentioned how ancient Egyptians used ropes to plan temples. Overstreet remembered his father, a mason, also being interested in these Egyptian "rope-stretchers."

By 1967, Overstreet started working with shaped canvases, like Frank Stella. These paintings also touched on political topics, such as Agent Orange (1967). Overstreet wanted to move away from traditional Western painting styles. He looked for inspiration in art from North Africa, Islamic mosques, Mali, and Native American art. He used wooden dowels to make complex shapes for his canvases. He painted figures and patterns from Aztec, Benin, and Egyptian cultures.

He said, "I was beginning to look at my art in a different light, not as protest, but as a statement about people. I began to work with the iconography of Native Americans and East Indians, of Oceania and Africa. By 1970 I had broken free from notions that paintings had to be on the wall in rectangular shapes.”

The Flight Pattern Series: 1970s

Joe Overstreet is perhaps best known for his shaped paintings from the 1970s. These paintings were not stretched on traditional frames. Instead, he used canvas tarps with metal rings (grommets). Ropes were used to hang them from walls, floors, and ceilings in the exhibition space.

One of his most important groups of works is the Flight Pattern series from 1971. In these, canvas tarps are tied with ropes to the ceiling and floor. Overstreet explained, “I began to make paintings that were tentlike. I was making nomadic art, and I could roll it up and travel. When I showed them, I rolled them up and took them on a plane.” His painting Power Flight (1971) is now in the Brooklyn Museum.

Overstreet studied cultures that moved from place to place (nomadic cultures). He liked the idea of a "double" or "foreign" identity. He wanted his art to feel light and able to "lift up," like birds flying. Many of his 1971 paintings used mandala imagery, which are circular designs with spiritual meaning. Overstreet was also interested in tantric yoga and Navajo sand painting rituals. He believed that "Art is about the coming together of expression, cultures crossing…"

He said, “I was trying to create a reflection of what in my past I had felt had run parallel: Native Americans, African nomadic people, black people here who had no homes—there was a lot of homelessness in those years. We had survived with our art by rolling it up and moving it all over. So I made this art you could hang any place. I felt like a nomad myself, with all the insensitivity in America.” He noted that his work has been "tied up in abstract shape with what blacks have felt and struggled” for decades.

After the 1971 Flight Pattern series, Overstreet kept exploring how paintings could break away from traditional ways of being shown. He hung tarps with ropes in flexible, three-dimensional ways. His Icarus paintings used dotted colors on bent pipes, creating soft, curved shapes that looked like airplane wings. In his Fibonacci series, the structure of the art was based on the Fibonacci system of numbers (1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34).

Later Works: 1980s-2000s

In the 1980s, Joe Overstreet created a large public art project. He made 75 steel and neon panels for the San Francisco International Airport.

For many years, Overstreet experimented with how paintings could look and feel. He also explored complex cultural histories. He created his Storyville series, which showed scenes from the jazz neighborhood of New Orleans in the early 1900s. In 1992, while showing his art in Senegal, he visited the House of Slaves on Gorée Island. This visit inspired his series called Door of No Return.

Over the next two years, he explored different paint textures on large canvases. These works showed his interest in sacred geometry, which is about shapes and patterns that have special meaning.

In his Silver Screens and Meridian Fields from the early 2000s, he painted on steel wire cloth. He was interested in how transparent the art could be. These "screen" paintings showed new ways of working with art. They used fabric, spray paint, and different materials to challenge old ideas about art and craft.

Art Galleries: Kenkeleba House and Wilmer Jennings Gallery

Joe Overstreet's art is now represented by the Eric Firestone Gallery.

In 1974, Joe Overstreet, his wife Corrine Jennings, and Samuel C. Floyd started Kenkeleba House. It was located at 214 E. 2nd St. In 1991, they opened a second gallery across the street, called Wilmer Jennings Gallery.

Both galleries were non-profit spaces. They showed art by African American artists and artists of color who were not always well-known. They had many different cultural programs. Kenkeleba House showed young artists who later became famous, like Rose Piper and David Hammons. They also had important historical exhibitions of work by major Black painters like Norman Lewis.

Exhibitions

Group Exhibitions

• 2017: Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power. Tate Modern, London. This show traveled to other museums in 2018.
• 2015: The EY Exhibit: The World Goes Pop. Tate Modern, London.
• 2011: Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA.
• 2005: Water. Bridgetown Embassy, Barbados. This was sponsored by the Art in Embassies Program of the U.S. Department of State.
• 1992-3: A/CROSS CURRENTS: Synthesis in African American Abstract Painting. This show was part of the Dakar Biennale in Senegal and traveled to other places in Africa.
• 1992.4: DREAM SINGERS, STORYTELLERS: An African-American Presence. New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, and venues in Japan.
• 1989: The Blues Aesthetic. Washington Project for the Arts; a traveling exhibition.
• 1986: U.S. Art Census, 1986: Contemporary Afro-American Artists. Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA.

Solo Exhibitions

• 2019: Joe Overstreet, Selected Works: 1975-1982. Eric Firestone Gallery, New York, NY.
• 2018: Joe Overstreet, Innovation of Flight: Paintings 1967-1972. Eric Firestone Gallery, New York, NY.
• 2008: The Storyville Series. City Gallery East, Atlanta, GA.
• 2003: Meridian Fields. Wilmer Jennings Gallery, New York, NY.
• 1996: (Re) Call and Response. Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY.
• 1996: Joe Overstreet: Works from 1957 to 1993. New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, NJ.
• 1965: Hugo Gallery, New York, NY.
• 1955: Vesuvio Cafe, San Francisco, CA.

Museum Collections

Joe Overstreet's artworks are held in many private and public collections around the world. These include:

• Brooklyn Museum
• Mississippi Museum of Art
• Rose Art Museum
• Rennie Museum
• Menil Collection