The Menil Collection The Menil Collection

In the early 1970s, American artist Joe Overstreet abandoned traditional painting stretchers and let his paintings leap off the wall. He spliced, stained, and stitched together fabric to create three-dimensional arrangements of canvas and rope, with planes of vivid color that torque and twist around empty space. With these works, called Flight Patterns, Overstreet advanced abstraction as a site for social and political meaning. Along with his fellow Black abstractionists, he challenged the prevailing bias toward figural representation, the privileged mode of expression during the Black Arts Movement. Rather than overt representation, the politics in Free Direction are conveyed through its form and dynamic structure. Designing the Flight Patterns to be rolled up for easy transit and calling them “tent-like” and “nomadic,” Overstreet summoned references to his itinerant childhood amidst the Great Migration, while evoking broader conditions of dislocation and dispossession that he saw as common to the Black experience. Significant, too, are the “noose knots” that Overstreet tied at the cotton ropes’ ends, alluding to the brutal history of lynching in the United States. Described by the artist as “birds in flight,” able to “take off, to lift up, rather than be held down,” the Flight Patterns are at once free-flowing and frozen in space, aloft and earthbound, their soaring held in check by tautly pulled ropes. Through their simultaneous bondage and flight, they reveal the structuring tensions of their time, exploring pressing questions around ideas of identity, resistance, and freedom. This work was included in an exhibition of Overstreet’s work organized by the founders of the Menil Collection, John and Dominique de Menil. Held in Houston in 1972, it would be the last dedicated showing of the Flight Patterns for more than four decades, and the last one outside New York until Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight at the Menil Collection in 2025.