Joe Overstreet, Boxes

[music]

0:00:06.4 Steven Zucker: We’re at the Hudson River Museum looking at a work of art by Joe Overstreet. I’m not quite sure how to describe it, because it’s both painting and sculpture.

0:00:16.1 Shilpi Chandra: This piece called “Boxes” is part of a series that he did where he very consciously took paintings off the wall. And he has a great quote that talks about why he began to make paintings that were tent-like. So, he was talking about the nomadic nature of African American life. And he says, “I could roll it up and travel with it,” and attributes that as a reason why African Americans were able to almost survive in this country in this time of racism, where they had to constantly be fleeing, sometimes fleeing mobs, fleeing the South. By this time in the 1970s, he’d been practicing art for over a decade. He came to this structure which was tent-like, which was like a bird in flight, these metaphors for movement and flight.

0:01:02.3 Steven Zucker: We’re seeing not only the front, the surface of the painting, but we’re also seeing underneath it. It is protective. It is like a tent. It allows us to, at least in our imagination, inhabit this work of art.

0:01:14.9 Shilpi Chandra: And even the way that we display it gives you that feeling that you could move into it or see under it, and have that feeling that it might envelop you and be protective.

0:01:26.1 Steven Zucker: And he’s made a number of interesting choices. He hasn’t hemmed the edge. The edge is slightly frayed, slightly worn. It feels a little bit contingent. The colors are really bright. There’s these oranges and teal blues and yellows and reds and purples. It’s a really vibrant surface. But I think it’s important to look at the date of this work, 1970, and think about what painting meant at that historical moment. This was a decade and a half or so after Abstract Expressionism had been the center of the avant-garde. Canvases by people like Jackson Pollock had given way to what was referred to as “color field painting,” a style of painting that was dominant when this was being made, where a kind of flatness was primary. And so there is an incredible kind of bravery here in the artist taking his canvas off the stretcher bars and beginning to understand those painted surfaces in space.

0:02:21.4 Shilpi Chandra: He did start out with the Abstract Expressionist, but as he got more familiar with the civil rights movement, he was also thinking about, “How do I put that into my own works? How do I help the cause?” so to speak. He was very conscious of what was happening in the art world at that time. And there were other people who were doing shaped canvases. So, he had seen Frank Stella’s work with shaped canvases. And he did some of those works as well before he came to this piece, where he actually took it off the wall and let the canvas dictate how it would fall and how it would shape the painted imagery. So, the boxes are very reminiscent, say, maybe of color field painting, but there is also a figure superimposed on top of the boxes. So, at the same time that he’s working in that mode of abstraction, there is also this referencing the figure, and in particular the African American figure.

0:03:16.4 Steven Zucker: Joe Overstreet had been part of the Black Arts Movement and was keenly aware of the conversations that were taking place within that community about the artist’s responsibility to the civil rights movement. Should their work be explicit? Should it be figurative? Or could it be abstract? Could that art focus also on formal issues that were not specifically about the Black experience? And I think for an artist like Joe Overstreet, he was finding means to meld both of these parallel currents.

0:03:46.4 Shilpi Chandra: So, in his personal life, he was a force for Black Arts and paved the way for a lot of other Black artists through this space called Kenkeleba House.

0:03:55.6 Steven Zucker: Although it’s not actually the case, I do get the sense that this particular work of art could be configured in any number of ways. Certainly, as I walk around it, I see it completely differently. It is surprising at every angle.

0:04:08.4 Shilpi Chandra: So, he was looking at a medium that was very much connected with the Western canon, specifically oil on canvas, and thinking about how to transform it in a way that was true to himself and to his lived experiences in America.

0:04:22.3 Steven Zucker: He’s breaking so many rules here. In 1970, color field art was emphatically flat, but it could create a kind of tension by creating geometric forms, such as the cubes that we’re seeing here, that would insist on a three-dimensionality and yet also collapse in their two-dimensionality. But what was not permitted in 1970 was the introduction of the human figure into the grid. It was something that artists had really pulled away from. And here the artist is placing these things together and then taking that radical step, taking the canvas off the stretcher bars, reshaping it. And so this object exists in space like our three-dimensional bodies do, as our perceptions understand space. But it’s still referencing the flatness of the plane of the canvas all at the same time.

0:05:09.7 Shilpi Chandra: When you walk around it, you walk around it like you do a sculpture. You see it and you feel it within the space. And you get a different viewpoint as you walk around the piece that you don’t get when you have something that’s just on the wall. It’s a piece that grabs attention. As soon as you walk into the gallery, you wonder, “Is that a sculpture or is that a painting?”

[music]

This work at Art Bridges

The Kenkeleba House

Natalie Dupêcher, Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025).

Mark Godfrey, Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963–1983 (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2017).

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