2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight' Review: Precision and Progression at the Menil Collection
Houston
A question for a hypothetical curatorial seminar in 'Reconciling Abstraction and Social Comment in Contemporary American Painting': What to make of the African-American abstract painter Joe Overstreet? The exhibition 'Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight,' at the Menil Collection in Houston, is at first glance—and more so after longer visual consideration without reading explanatory labels—a show of dazzlingly inventive abstraction, with both convincing and somewhat tenuous visual connections to the situation of black people in American society. (Organized by associate curator Natalie Dupêcher, the show continues through July 13 before traveling to the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson.) The exhibition features such gracefully daring work as 'Free Direction' (1971), a 10-foot-wide semi-sculpture, in purple and black, of squares and parallelograms in tentlike tension.
