Joe Overstreet’s 1972 “Untitled” resembles a colorful paper plane taking flight or a kite floating against the wind—or, in this case, away from the wall. Cotton ropes and metal grommets anchor the artwork to the wall and floor in intricate angles, light shining from above giving the artwork its own shadow. He mixed Egyptian rope stretching and his prior experience of assisting his father, who was a stone mason, with laying concrete and sail-rigging to create these multi-dimensional pieces that emulate themes of flight and movement.
“Untitled” is one of many art pieces in Joe Overstreet’s “Flight Patterns,” one of three art collections in the “Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight” exhibit showing at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson through Jan. 25, 2026. The exhibit explores Overstreet’s abstract phase with a common thread being the idea of movement, which plays a huge role in his creative works and his personal life.
Mississippi Museum of Art Curator Kaegan Sparks said that Houston, Texas, museum The Menil Collection put together the exhibition and that MMA is the only tour venue for these artworks, making the Jackson institution the only other art museum to present them. The exhibit premiered at the downtown Jackson museum Nov. 1, 2025 and it will close on Sunday, Jan. 25.
The artworks are a combination of loans from private collections, other museum collections, and Eric Firestone Gallery, the gallery that represents Overstreet estate. The artworks will return to those lenders once the show is over.
The structure of the exhibit was pre-made with the works spanning in chronological order from the 1960s, 1970s and 1990s. Sparks calls it a survey exhibition, a selection of Overstreet’s work as he continued to create well into the 2000s. Menil Collection Associate Curator of Modern Art Natalie Dupêcher focused on these three collections as the strongest examples of his abstract painting practice.
“And as far as the layout, we wanted to first of all make sure that each of the artworks has the space that it needs to sort of shine and look its best; that’s always one of the primary considerations,” Sparks explained. “And then it’s about sort of telling the story, unfolding the information in a sequence that makes sense for visitors.”
For added engagement, MMA curators added quotes throughout the gallery based on research that the Menil Collection gathered from Overstreet’s interviews and essays.
“He did a number of interviews, but I would say he didn’t get the recognition that he deserved while he was alive,” Sparks said of Overstreet, who died in 2019. “I was shocked that the ‘Flight Patterns,’ which are such interesting works, hadn’t been exhibited. This is the biggest presentation of those works since the early ’70s. … Hopefully, the show will have an impact on people’s interest in him in the future.”
‘A New Beginning’
In 1933, Joe Overstreet was born in Conehatta, Mississippi, in Newton County to parents of Cherokee and Shoshone descent. In 1941, wartime demand for cement led the family to leave their pulpwood farm and join the second wave of the Great Migration. Overstreet and his family moved seven times across the country before he was a teenager, with his family eventually settling in the San Francisco Bay Area.
There, he came into his own and connected with Black writers Bob Kaufman and Ishamel Reed, with whom he shared a studio. In 1958, he and Kaufman moved to New York City, which was developing a sizable, burgeoning art scene. Four years later, he moved to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, living within blocks of other writers and musicians like John Coltrane and Sun Ra.
The Black Arts Movement, a creative output across visual art, writing, music and performance shaped by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, inspired much of Overstreet’s art pieces during this period—a time in which Black art was largely the total opposite of the western cultural aesthetic. The movement derives its name from a 1966 speech Stokely Carmichael recited to a crowd in Greenwood, Miss., chanting “We want Black Power!”.
Overstreet’s art seems to break the rules with its audacious colors and unique shapes that bleed into one another. The artwork itself is a shape and within it lie other shapes that tell a larger story. His 1968 piece “North Star” combines stars along with square and triangular shapes to create this puzzle-esque artwork that pays homage to the African American folk song “Follow the Drinking Gourd.”
The song references the Big Dipper constellation as a guide for locating Polaris, the North Star, which is referred to in many slave songs and narratives. The streaks of color that feel slashed across the artwork resemble constellations in the sky at night, while the borders of the work are molded to resemble the lower halves of the star shape.
“I made a breakthrough in my painting in 1967 when I began to look at shapes and rectangles,” Overstreet wrote, his words legible on walls near his displays. “I began collaging these and other shapes to break the picture plane of European rectangular painting. I wanted a different source for a new beginning.”
“Untitled (Sun Ra series)” is dedicated to jazz musician Sun Ra, who became an early icon and figure of the Afrofuturism movement. The movement is defined by visual art, film, music and literature that imagines liberatory futures for Black people through science and technology. Overstreet’s piece takes direct inspiration from Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Egyptian God, Sun Ra, whom the musician cosplayed as in the 1974 film “Space is the Place.”
One of the most interesting aspects of the artwork is its use of shape, particularly in how the eye rests in a rectangular face. The figure is odd: It features even, long legs and uneven shoulders that somehow work in tandem in ways that seem both modern and ancient.
Sparks noted that people sometimes don’t understand what they’re looking at when observing abstract art, which can make it intimidating. In the first section, she wanted to show that these works weren’t made in isolation or a vacuum, but in conjunction with writers, artists, musicians and playwrights he lived amongst in the lower Eastside of New York.
“I wanted to bring out some of those moments of creative exchange with these different individuals to give a broader picture of both historical context, but also kind of a bigger artistic scene that Overstreet was a part of,” the curator explained.
‘Flight Patterns’
By the 1970s, Joe Overstreet began utilizing grommets and ropes to suspend his artwork from the floors, ceilings and walls. He named this series of works “Flight Patterns,” comparing them to birds’ wings and describing their ability to move and “become alive.” The tension and flexibility of the rope help the art respond to the surrounding architecture.
“Flight Patterns” melds together much of Overstreet’s personal background. The suspension tools harken back to his days assisting his father, a stone mason; the resemblance of the pieces to boat sails reflect his time spent traveling the world with the Merchant Marine; and the portability of the art is an ode to his indigenous heritage.
“In the late ’60s, I did rope pieces—pieces that were hung on ropes, not stretchers—because of my heritage and how the Native Americans moved their tents, rolled’em up, and moved things around,” Overstreet’s nearby words read. “I felt like a nomad myself at times, and in those years there was homelessness. … We could survive with our art by rolling it up and moving all over, and I tried to show that.”
“Saint Expedite II” is an ode to Pan-Africanism with the utilization of the flag colors: green, red and black. Pan-Africanism is a global movement fostering unity, solidarity and empowerment of people of African descent. Marcus Garvey, one of the key leaders that shaped the movement, proposed a “Back-to-Africa” movement, wherein he encouraged people of African descent to unite and migrate back to Africa to establish an independent nation free of racial oppression.
The grommets and rope give the square green and red boxes a 3D effect, the rope tethering the art piece and the wall. From one angle, the boxes look like two-dimensional squares, but from another, they resemble cubes. The color black unifies the green and red boxes, pulling the entire piece together. Each work in “Flight Patterns” has a single noose knot near the floor in protest to the brutal history of lynching.
“Our installation is a little bit different from what The Menil Collection did. … I really wanted to try to animate the space to kind of use the sculptural, the 3D properties of the works, to change the sensory experience of being in that space—looking at the paintings and kind of how your body feels when you’re close to them, how the shadows interact with each other and the light around them,” Sparks explained.
“The Great Mother of All,” an all-green piece anchored by ropes that stretches across the wall of the museum, anchored by ropes and grommets on floor and ceiling, resembles a leaf with red lines running through it reminiscent of veins, though the shape of the artwork resembles the structure of a bird’s wing. The red and blue line that zigs and zags across the canvas creates mini triangles, squares and quadrilaterals.
The piece’s title may or may not be a reference to the continent of Africa, whose nickname is “The Mother of All” due to scientific understanding tracing modern humans to Africa to a common female ancestor, Mitochondrial Eve. Africa is also the second largest continent with 54 countries, more than 2,000 languages and huge mineral wealth.
“Like the geometry in jazz or the geometry in nature, I could take a shape and improvise on it: I could redesign a square and make it an octagon,” Overstreet said. “… The ropes were part of the geometry, and the shadows were, too, because these pieces were in relief from the wall, so the shadows and the ropes were parts of the space.”
‘Facing the Door of No Return’
In 1992, Overstreet and his partner visited Dakar, Senegal. While there, he was able to visit a building on Goree Island called House of Slaves, which was a central port in the Transatlantic Slave Trade that once confined dozens of Africans in a 10-by-12-foot chamber before they forcibly boarded ships heading to the Americas. “The Door of No Return” is an opening in the building that showcases the sea.
Dubbed “Facing the Door of No Return,” this series is drastically different from his first two collections, leaning into the artist’s more abstract style. “House of Slaves” is built from local stone and coral rock, giving the building a textured and layered lock. The paintings in this series emulate that same textured style and focus less on the pain and negativity associated with Goree Island and more on the highlights of his experience in Dakar.
“I needed to personalize my experience there through abstraction,” Overstreet explained. “I didn’t want to deal just with the past, with the Middle Passage. I didn’t need that; that’s been fed. I didn’t want to paint in sorrow. Going there allowed me to go past slavery. … I think these paintings represent optimism and hope, but I also wanted to capture the sense of the burden of African history.”
“Exit Dust” fuses together tones of orange, yellow and blue to create what resembles the sun descending after a long day, the sky bursting with oranges, pinks and blues in the moments before night takes over. Whereas his earlier pieces utilized the manipulation of shapes, shadows and angles to help evoke a story, this one solely relies on abstraction, letting the colors and the rough, ragged, layered style take the forefront.
To achieve this effect, Overstreet mixed oil paint with beeswax and transferred it to the canvas using pieces of newsprint. “Kermel” is an ode to the Marche Kermel, a round, domed market building known for fresh foods like fish and produce inside and surrounding stalls selling tourist goods, crafts, wood carvings and jewelry. The canvas utilizes mostly a combination of browns, nudes and pinks, which match the color of the market’s building. The textured, vertical strokes across the canvas offer a very busy look, much like the bustling activity of a market.
“They’re very different from the other works in the show. It almost feels like a totally separate section or exhibition right unto itself,” Sparks said. “They are 10-by-12 feet in dimension … so those dimensions of the paintings refer to that building and the dark history of that building. But he was really kind of trying to do something transformative.”
Corrine Jennings, a curator and Joe Overstreet’s partner, talked about the intense sunlight and dust drifting in the air that they experienced in Senegal, which can be reflected in the colors and details in certain paintings. One of the works has abstract patterns that refer to a stack of baskets from a marketplace in Senegal and some pieces have rectangular sections that refer to The Door of No Return, Sparks said
“My paintings don’t let the onlooker glance over them, but rather take them deeply into them and let them out—many times by different routes,” Overstreet’s quote reads. “These trips are taken subtly and sometimes suddenly.”
‘Abstract Art Is for Everybody’
Although Joe Overstreet only lived in Mississippi until the age of 7, he always kept the state in his memory. The colors of the landscape in rural Mississippi had a huge effect on his work. He often talked about his grandparents, the pulpwood farm they had and his experience in nature as a young child.
“He also made a series of works that refer to Mississippi. One’s named after the Pearl River, and there’s one named ‘Conehatta,’” Sparks said. “I think the whole series is called ‘Meridian Fields,’ so that already shows you that he made the most of those in the early 2000s. He was really reflecting on his early experiences there.”
In 2018, Overstreet came back to Mississippi to accept the Excellence in Visual Art Award from the Mississippi Arts Commission. He also paid a visit to the Mississippi Museum of Art as one of his paintings was included in “Picturing Mississippi,” an exhibit exploring the state’s identity through art.
Joe Overstreet passed away June 4, 2019, at the age of 85. He is survived by his wife, Corrine; a sister, La Verda Allen; and four children: Veronica Chavis, Dominik, Jahn and Jamahl Overstreet.
The exhibition concludes next weekend with a two-day event that will be focused on Joe Overstreet’s alternative art-space that he co-founded on the lower East side of Manhattan in 1974 and that still operates today. Known as the Kenkeleba House, it was one of few institutions that focused on artists of color, particularly Black artists.
“They’ve done a lot of work to lease studio space to artists to give them exhibitions and publications and create an archive and resources. It’s been this longstanding project that while he was alive, he was very actively involved with,” she explained.
Curator Kaegan Sparks said the museum is very happy to be able to give Joe Overstreet and other artists of color a platform during these uncertain times for art institutions. She hopes the show can be an entry point into learning about that period of time and sparking curiosity about the Black Arts Movement, a topic the museum will focus on again in July with a photo exhibit.
”I think one of the messages that we’ve tried to issue with the show is that abstract art is for everybody. And that all kinds of people make abstract art and that it doesn’t require a special kind of background to appreciate,” she stated.
“Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight” will be showing at the Mississippi Museum of Art until January 25. The closing event for the exhibit takes place from Jan. 23 to Jan. 24 with tickets available for purchase here. The exhibit is $15 for adults, $13 for elders, and $10 for youth and college students. MMA members and children age 5 and under may enter for free. For more information about the exhibit and museum, visit msmuseumart.org.