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for Joe Overstreet
Joe Overstreet
born Conehatta, MS 1933; died New York, NY 2019
BornConehatta, Mississippi, United States
DiedNew York, New York, United States
BiographyJoe Overstreet began his career in the California Bay Area after studying at Contra Costa College and the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute). In the late 1950s, he moved to New York City where he lived and worked until his recent death in 2019. Overstreet and his partner Corrine Jennings operated the art space Kenkeleba House, which across the decades has played a seminal role in exhibiting experimental art, particularly by artists of color. Overstreet is best known for his sculptural approach to painting, which draws on cross-cultural sources, including Egyptian engineering, and his own experience as a mason. His abstract works are shaped, stretched, and tented using rope and dowel rods, creating three-dimensional objects that fly into space. In 1996, the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton organized the only major retrospective of the artist’s work, titled Joe Overstreet: Works from 1957–1993. Overstreet’s paintings have been featured in a number of historic group exhibitions. “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. . . . When the viewer is away from the paintings, they will get flashes of the paintings that linger in the mind like that of a tune or melody of a song.”
Person TypeIndividual
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