Richard Hylton

  • The Significance of Joe Overstreet’s Facing the Door of No Return (1993)

    • The Significance of Joe Overstreet’s Facing the Door of No Return (1993)
    My text 'The Significance of Joe Overstreet’s Facing the Door of No Return (1993)' is one of several included in Joe Overstreet Taking Flight
    The Menil Collection, Houston
    ed. Natalie Dupêcher
    New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025 
    176 Pages, 241 x 279 mm, 85 colour illus.
      

    "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."

    Texts by

    Natalie Dupêcher

    Darby English

    Richard Hylton

    Rebecca Rabinow

    Ishmael Reed

    Abbe Schriber 

     
    More +
    Joe Overstreet; Taking Flight
     
    'Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight, the first major museum exhibition in nearly thirty years devoted to the work of this pioneering abstract painter. Renowned for his innovative approach to nonrepresentational painting, American artist Joe Overstreet (1933–2019) consistently sought to intertwine abstraction and social politics. This presentation will include his landmark Flight Pattern series of radially suspended paintings from the early 1970s and bodies of work from the 1960s and 1990s. Overstreet made a significant contribution to postwar art, positioning abstraction as an expansive tool for exploring the idea of freedom and the Black experience in the United States. Curated by Natalie Dupêcher, Associate Curator of Modern Art, The Menil Collection'

     

    The Menil Collection, Houston
    January 24 – July 13, 2025
     
    Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson
    November 1, 2025–January 25, 2026

    View more information at: https://www.menil.org/exhibitions/385-joe-overstreet-taking-flight

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