Upper School JA students enrolled in art classes visited the Mississippi Museum of Art last week to study a special exhibition of abstract art. The exhibition is devoted to the work of a pioneering, Mississippi-born painter. “Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight” brings together examples of three phases of the artist’s painting practice and features 25 works.
Overstreet was an African-American painter from Conehatta, Mississippi, who lived and worked in New York City for most of his career, explained Upper School Art Instructor Susan Ingram. By studying his work, students gain insight into the Abstract Expressionist movement, which he was associated with in the 1950s and early 1960s. Many of Overstreet’s paintings are direct responses to the Civil Rights movement, racism, and the history of lynching.
According to a press release from MMA, Overstreet’s best-known paintings, the Flight Patterns from the early 1970s, are central to the exhibition. To create them, he applied brightly colored paint to loose canvas and suspended the resultant work between the floors, walls, and ceilings using metal grommets and cotton ropes. While Overstreet intended the ropes to evoke the United States’s brutal history of lynching, he also perceived these works as hopeful and redemptive. He described them as “birds in flight” that strive to “take off, to lift up, rather than be held down.”
The exhibition’s presentation in Jackson marks a homecoming for Overstreet, whose unique visual imagination was cultivated during his early childhood on his family’s pulpwood farm in rural Conehatta, Mississippi. Although he left the state at a young age, the South continued to influence Overstreet’s later work. Organized in collaboration with the artist’s estate, the exhibition includes key loans from North American museums and private collections, as well as many works that have never been publicly exhibited. “Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight“ is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by Yale University Press. The exhibit runs through January 25, 2026. While at the museum, students also visited the Mississippi Permanent Exhibit.
