Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight @ The Menil Collection, Houston

Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight

The Menil Collection, Houston 

Through July 13, 2025

Joe Overstreet with his Flight Patterns, 1972

Courtesy of Menil Archives, The Menil Collection, Houston

Photo: Hickey-Robertson, Houston

Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight 

The Menil Collection, Houston 

January 24 - July 13, 2025

Installation view. Photo by Lauren Marek

Courtesy of The Menil Collection, Houston

Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight 

The Menil Collection, Houston 

January 24 - July 13, 2025

Installation view. Photo by Lauren Marek

Courtesy of The Menil Collection, Houston

The Menil Collection prsents Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight, an exhibition focused on the vibrant, politically charged abstract paintings created by pioneering artist JOE OVERSTREET (1933–2019). This presentation is organized chronologically and features Overstreet’s landmark Flight Pattern series of radially suspended paintings from the early 1970s, alongside crucial bodies of work that preceded and followed them. Taking Flight is the first major museum exhibition in nearly thirty years devoted to the work of this avant-garde artist.

Renowned for his innovative approach to nonrepresentational painting, Joe Overstreet stood at the forefront of artists who sought to intertwine abstraction and social politics. He made a significant contribution to postwar art, positioning abstraction as an expansive tool for exploring the idea of freedom and the Black experience in the United States.

“The Menil is proud to present Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight,” said Rebecca Rabinow, Director, The Menil Collection. “John and Dominique de Menil’s support of the artist began in the early 1970s when a painting was commissioned by him for an exhibition about the African American experience that the couple sponsored in Houston, Texas. Soon after, they purchased two of Overstreet’s Flight Pattern works and invited him back to Houston for a solo show. Now, some fifty years later, the Menil Collection looks forward to sharing his work with a new generation of visitors, both through this beautiful, thought-provoking exhibition, and the illustrated scholarly catalogue that provides fascinating insight and context for the appreciation of this artist’s work.”

In 1967, the artist began to build intricate, shaped canvas constructions, departing from the more representational style he had pursued in the early 1960s. In these works, Joe Overstreet combined new shapes and often matched the form of the underlying structure with geometric painted compositions. Justice, Faith, Hope, and Peace, 1968, is emblematic of this breakthrough, summoning references to current political events in a resolutely abstract language.

Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight 

The Menil Collection, Houston 

January 24 - July 13, 2025

Installation view. Photo by Lauren Marek

Courtesy of The Menil Collection, Houston

Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight 

The Menil Collection, Houston 

January 24 - July 13, 2025

Installation view. Photo by Sarah Hobson

Courtesy of The Menil Collection, Houston

Joe Overstreet’s best-known paintings, the Flight Patterns from 1970–1972, are central to the exhibition. To create these works, which the artist called “tent-like” and “nomadic,” he boldly applied brightly colored paint to unstretched canvases, which he suspended with taut ropes from the gallery’s floor, wall, and ceiling. The ropes were intended to evoke the brutal history of lynching in the United States, yet he also perceived these dynamic works as hopeful and redemptive. He described them as “birds in flight,” able to “take off, to lift up, rather than be held down.” In works like Free Direction, 1972, Joe Overstreet pushed the limits of the traditional medium of painting so that the piece appeared to leap off the wall, thus inaugurating a dynamic relationship between object, viewer, and architecture. This inventiveness was characteristic of his entire career.

Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight 

The Menil Collection, Houston 

January 24 - July 13, 2025

Installation view. Photo by Sarah Hobson

Courtesy of The Menil Collection, Houston

In the 1990s, following an inspiring trip to Senegal and the House of Slaves memorial on Gorée Island, Joe Overstreet created a series of monumental abstractions that address the African diaspora and explore questions of inheritance and memory. He described the Senegal paintings as “personal, emotional examinations of my past, present and future.” Works such as Gorée, 1993, display the artist’s material experimentation, which gave the paintings a weathered, luminous translucency, evoking the country’s “drifting opaque dust” and “searing white sunlight.”

“We have been honored to work closely with the estate of Joe Overstreet to create this significant presentation of his work,” said Natalie Dupêcher, Associate Curator of Modern Art, The Menil Collection. “Overstreet’s formally adventurous, culturally engaged, and politically responsive abstract work brilliantly expands the canon of 20th century art.”

Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight includes key loans from United States museums and private collections, as well as major paintings from the estate that have rarely been on view. Curated by Natalie Dupêcher, Associate Curator of Modern Art, The Menil Collection, the exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with new scholarly texts and installation images from the exhibition, available in late spring.

JOE OVERSTREET (1933–2019)

Born in rural Conehatta, Mississippi, Joe Overstreet began his career in the California Bay Area in the early 1950s, taking classes at several arts colleges, exhibiting in local galleries and jazz clubs, and participating in the Beat scene. In 1958, he moved to New York, where he joined a vibrant community of young artists exploring the possibilities of nonrepresentational abstraction. In the late 1960s, Joe Overstreet began working with shaped canvases. By 1970, with the Flight Pattern works, he had let his painting leap off the wall. After this series, he continued to experiment with new approaches to painting, investigating its spatial and textural possibilities. Committed to the intersection of social activism and artistic practice, Joe Overstreet cofounded Kenkeleba House, an arts organization and gallery, in 1974 with his wife, curator and historian Corrine Jennings, and writer Samuel Floyd. Working until his last years, Joe Overstreet died in New York City in 2019.

THE MENIL COLLECTION

1533 Sul Ross St., Houston, TX 77006

www.menil.org

Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight @ The Menil Collection, Houston , January 24 - July 13, 2025

Ruth Asawa @ Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC + Menil Drawing Institute, Houston - Ruth Asawa Through Line

Ruth Asawa Through Line

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

September 16, 2023 - January 15, 2024

Ruth Asawa Through Line is the first exhibition to examine Ruth Asawa’s oeuvre through the lens of her lifelong drawing practice. Co-organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Menil Collection, this presentation reveals the complexity and richness of the materials and processes she experimented with, emphasizing the foundational role that drawing played in developing her distinct visual language. While now widely recognized as a sculptor, Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) practiced drawing daily, referring to the act as her “greatest pleasure and the most difficult.” Through drawing, Ruth Asawa explored the world around her and the boundaries of the medium itself, turning everyday encounters into moments of profound beauty and endowing ordinary objects with new aesthetic possibilities.

Positioning drawings, collages, and watercolors alongside stamped prints, copper foil works, and sketchbooks, the exhibition exposes the breadth of Ruth Asawa’s innovative practice through over one hundred works from public and private collections, many of which have not been previously exhibited. Organized thematically, the presentation begins with foundational lessons the artist absorbed and built upon at Black Mountain College in the late 1940s. Subsequent galleries examine the function of repetition and the development of specific motifs and approaches—from the Greek meander to the paper fold—and how they recur throughout her work. The exhibition shows how drawing emerged as a cornerstone of Ruth Asawa’s practice in San Francisco, later becoming a key component of her role as an educator and community leader in the Bay Area. Surveying the artist’s impressive range and expansive approach, Ruth Asawa Through Line offers an unparalleled window into Ruth Asawa’s exploratory and resourceful approach to materials, line, surface, and space.

This exhibition is co-organized by Kim Conaty, Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings and Prints at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Edouard Kopp, John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation Chief Curator of the Menil Drawing Institute, with Scout Hutchinson, Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum, and Kirsten Marples, Curatorial Associate at the Menil Drawing Institute. 

After the exhibition closes at the Whitney, it will travel to the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston.

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART

99 Gansevoort Street, New York, NY 10014

whitney.org

Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938, MoMA, Menil Collection, Art Institute of Chicago

Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938 

The Museum of Modern Art, NYC, Through January 12, 2014 

The Menil Collection, Houston, February 14 - June 1, 2014 

The Art Institute of Chicago, June 22 - October 12, 2014 

Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938, explores the evolution of René Magritte’s work from 1926 to 1938, an intensely innovative period in which he developed key strategies and techniques to defamiliarize the familiar—to make, in his words, “everyday objects shriek out loud.” During this time the artist was closely aligned with the Surrealist movement, and his uncanny depictions of ordinary objects constituted an important new direction in Surrealist art. Bringing together around 80 paintings, collages, and objects, along with a selection of photographs, periodicals, and early commercial work, the exhibition offers fresh insight into the beginnings of Magritte’s extraordinary career as a modern painter and Surrealist artist. In addition to works from MoMA’s collection, the exhibition includes many loans from public and private collections in the U.S. and abroad. Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938 at MoMA is organized by Anne Umland, The Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Curator of Painting and Sculpture, with Danielle Johnson, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture. The exhibition is organized by MoMA, The Menil Collection, and The Art Institute of Chicago, and travels to The Menil Collection and The Art Institute of Chicago. 

The first-ever concentrated presentation of Magritte's early Surrealist works, Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938 begins with paintings and collages Magritte created in Brussels in 1926 and 1927, in anticipation of and immediately following his first one-person exhibition at the Galerie Le Centaure, which launched his career as Belgium’s leading Surrealist painter. It follows Magritte to Paris, where he lived from 1927 to 1930 in order to be closer to center of the Surrealist movement, and concludes in 1938, the year Magritte delivered “La Ligne de vie” (“Lifeline”), an important autobiographical lecture that provided an account of his career as a Surrealist. 

Like all of the artists and poets associated with the Surrealist movement, Magritte sought to overthrow what he saw as the oppressive rationalism of bourgeois society. His art during these essential years is at times violent, frequently disturbing, and often filled with discontinuities. He consistently interrogated conventions of language and visual representation, using methods that included the misnaming of objects, doubling and repetition, mirroring and concealment, and the depiction of visions seen in half-waking states. All are devices that cast doubt on the nature of appearances—within Magritte’s paintings and within reality itself. 

Painted for his exhibition at Le Centaure, The Menaced Assassin (1927) is one of Magritte’s largest and most theatrical compositions. The vacantly staring figures and common, everyday objects, all rendered in Magritte’s flat, deadpan style, underscore what the Belgian abstract artist Pierre Flouquet characterized as the painting’s “banal crime.” In another painting from this period, Magritte depicts his “accomplice,” the Belgian Surrealist poet and leader Paul Nougé. Here two seemingly identical, formally dressed men are partially separated by a fragmented "door.” Through the use of doubling, Magritte challenges the conventional idea that a portrait should represent a singular self or an individual. 

These paintings are joined by a group of Magritte's early papiers collés, or collages. Such works include what would become signature motifs for the artist: bowler hats, theater curtains, and mysterious landscapes. Among them, The Lost Jockey has a singular status; in September 1926, poet Camille Goemans, Magritte's friend and dealer, associated this figure of the mounted jockey "hurtling recklessly into the void" with the artist himself. 

After moving to Paris in September 1927, Magritte worked at an unprecedented pace, producing some of his most radical and recognizable work. For his painting The Lovers (1928), Magritte invokes the cinematic cliché of a close-up kiss, but subverts its voyeuristic pleasures by shrouding the faces in cloth. The device of a draped cloth or veil to conceal a figure’s identity corresponds to a larger Surrealist interest in masks, disguises, and that which lies beyond or beneath visible surfaces. 

While in Paris Magritte explored the slippery relationship between words and images. His iconic painting The Treachery of Images (1929) presents a skillfully realistic simulacrum of a pipe rendered with the direct clarity of a shop sign or school primer. With the deceptively straightforward pronouncement “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” ("This is not a pipe") underneath the pictured pipe, Magritte declares that an image is not the same as what it purports to represent, a claim underscored by the title. 

Near the end of his years in Paris, Magritte made The Eternally Obvious (1930). In a simultaneous challenge and homage to the traditional artistic subject of the female nude, Magritte divides the female body into five framed and isolated sections. The Eternally Obvious is one of three unusual multipart “toiles découpés” (“cut-up paintings”) that Magritte created in anticipation of a one-man show at Galerie Goemans, Paris, in the spring of 1930. Magritte intended these works to be mounted on glass and specifically referred to them as “objects,” thus underscoring their unique position between painting and sculpture. The three works will be shown together in this exhibition for the first time since 1931. 

In July 1930, after the stock market crash and the closing of the Galerie Goemans, Magritte moved back to Brussels, where he continued to pursue new modes of image making. In 1932, Elective Affinities made Magritte realize he could create shock by exploring the secret affinities between objects—in this case, a cage and an egg—rather than through the juxtaposition of differences. With The Rape (1934) Magritte proposes a startlingly direct visual affinity between a woman’s face and her body; in his words, “The breasts are the eyes, the nose is a navel and the vagina replaces the mouth.” André Breton, the French Surrealist leader, considered the image a key Surrealist work, and reproduced it on the cover of the 1934 book Qu’est-ce que le Surréalisme? (What Is Surrealism?). 

The Human Condition (1933) brings together, for the first time, two of Magritte's favorite themes: the "window painting" and the "painting within a painting." On a standing easel in front of a window, a trompe l'oeil landscape painting on an unframed canvas merges almost seamlessly with the view outside. But the assumption that the easel painting is a "representation" while the surrounding space is "real" quickly reveals itself to be a false premise: the entire composition, of course, is a painted invention by Magritte. 

The exhibition also features a number of works produced for the eccentric British patron and poet Edward James, including The Red Model and On the Threshold of Liberty, two large works that were commissioned in 1937 as part of the decorative painting scheme for James’s ballroom. The finished paintings were installed behind two-way mirrors that dramatically revealed the artworks when illuminated from behind, creating a unique and theatrical Surrealist space. Magritte also made two “portraits manqués,” or "failed portraits," of James, in which the subject's face is hidden from view. Not to Be Reproduced (1937) features a variant of the doppelganger motif. A man looks at himself in the mirror, but instead of reflecting his face back to us, the mirror paradoxically repeats the view of him from the back. The Pleasure Principle (1937) is, according to Magritte, "a picture representing the man whose head is a light." 

In addition to early collages and an extensive selection of paintings, the exhibition brings together other groups of works from this period, including Surrealist objects, a category of artistic production that gained in popularity throughout the 1930s. Magritte created his first objects while in Brussels in 1932 by covering a pre-existing plaster statue of the Venus de Milo, The Copper Handcuffs, and a pre-existing plaster cast of Napoleon’s death mask, The Future of Statues, with paint. The exhibition also includes photographs that relate directly to the paintings and objects Magritte created during this time period, or that highlight his interest in performing for the camera in ways that parallel concerns expressed in his paintings. A selection of early commercial work and illustrations for books and periodicals is displayed as well. 

CATALOGUE - Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938 focuses on the breakthrough Surrealist years of René Magritte, creator of some of the 20th century’s most extraordinary images. Beginning in 1926, when Magritte first aimed to create paintings that would, in his words, “challenge the real world,” and concluding in 1938—a historically and biographically significant moment just before the outbreak of World War II—the richly illustrated publication traces the artist’s central strategies and themes. An introductory essay is followed by four focused studies of key groups of works, and an illustrated chronology outlines significant moments in the artist’s life between 1926 and 1938, including travel, connections with other Surrealist artists and writers, contributions to journals, and important exhibitions and reviews. Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926–1938 is published by The Museum of Modern Art and available at MoMA stores and online at MoMAstore.com. 256 pages; 225 color illustrations. Hardcover, $65. Paperback, $50, available at the MoMA Stores only. Distributed to the trade by ARTBOOK|D.A.P. in the United States and Canada. Distributed outside the United States and Canada by Thames & Hudson. 

SPONSORSHIP: Bank of America is the National Sponsor of Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938. Major support for the MoMA presentation is provided by the American Friends of Magritte, Inc., and by The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art. Additional funding is provided by the MoMA Annual Exhibition Fund. This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. 

Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York + San Francisco Museum of Modern art + The Menil Collection, Houston

Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

April 13 – August 28, 2011

The first retrospective of the drawings of American contemporary artist RICHARD SERRA is on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective traces the crucial role that drawing has played in Serra's work for more than 40 years. Although Richard Serra is well known for his large-scale and site-specific sculptures, his work has also changed the practice of drawing. This major exhibition shows how Serra's work has expanded the definition of drawing through innovative techniques, unusual media, monumental scale, and carefully conceived relationships to surrounding spaces. Featured are 60 works from the 1970s to the present, including many loans from important European and American collections, as well as large-scale works completed specifically for this presentation.

Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective follows the artist's investigation of drawing as an activity both independent from and linked to his sculptural practice. The exhibition begins with his drawings from the early 1970s, when he drew primarily on paper with ink, charcoal, lithographic crayon, and black paintstick—a crayon comprised of a mixture of pigment, oil, and wax. These works explore formal and perceptual relationships between his sculpture and the viewer. Over time, his drawings increased in scale and evolved into autonomous works of art that challenged the notion of drawing as preparatory work.

In the mid-1970s, Richard Serra made the first of his monumentally scaled Installation Drawings, some of which hang from floor to ceiling and have a width of 10 to 20 feet. To make works such as Pacific Judson Murphy (1978), the artist attached Belgian linen directly to the wall and covered the entire surface with black paintstick, using repetitive and vigorous physical gestures. The Installation Drawings marked a radical shift, altering conceptions of what a drawing is and how it can interact with architecture. Serra's drawings of this period control the space of entire rooms and disrupt perceptions of spatial relationships.

Richard Serra has written of these drawings, "By the nature of their weight, shape, location, flatness, and delineation along their edges, the black canvases enabled me to define spaces within a given architectural enclosure. The weight of the drawing derives not only from the number of layers of paintstick but mainly from the particular shape of the drawing."

In his drawings since the 1980s, Richard Serra has continued to invent new techniques and to explore a variety of surface effects, primarily on paper. In 1989, Richard Serra made a series of diptychs on large, heavy sheets of paintstick-covered paper. Several of the titles of these drawings—such as No Mandatory Patriotism and The United States Government Destroys Art—express the artist's reaction to the removal and disassembly of his sculpture Titled Arc, which was commissioned as a permanent work for New York City's Federal Plaza. The exhibition also includes works from several of his drawing series, such as Deadweight (1991), Weight and Measure (1994), Rounds (1996-97), and Out-of-Rounds (1999-2000).

In Serra's recent drawings, such as the Solids series (2007-2008), the accumulation of black paintstick on paper is so dense that nearly the entire surface of the paper is covered in a layer of viscous pigment. To make these drawings, Richard Serra often pours melted paintstick onto the floor and then lays the paper on top of the pigment. The paintstick is transferred to the sheet by pressing a hard marking tool onto the back of the paper. The exhibition swith a new drawing series from 2010 titled Elevational Weight.

Complementing the drawings there is a presentation of the artist's sketchbooks and four films made by the artist in 1968: Hand Catching Lead, Hand Lead Fulcrum, Hands Scraping, and Hands Tied.

RICHARD SERRA (b. 1939, San Francisco, California) studied at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, graduating with a BA in English literature. Serra then received an MFA from Yale University in 1964 and had one of his first New York exhibitions at Leo Castelli's Warehouse gallery, in 1967. His work has been the subject of major exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1977), The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1986 and 2007), Serpentine Gallery, London (1992), The Drawing Center, New York (1994), Dia: Chelsea, New York (1997), Guggenheim Bilbao (2005), and the Grand Palais, Paris (2008), among other museums.

Richard Serra has received numerous awards and accolades for his artistic achievements. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received honorary doctorates from Yale University and other universities. In 2008 he was named a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters of the French Academy and was decorated with the Order of the Arts and Letters of Spain. He received the Praemium Imperiale for Sculpture from the Japan Art Association in 1994 and the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts in 2010.

Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective is organized Bernice Rose, Chief Curator, Menil Drawing Institute and Study Center; Michelle White, Associate Curator, The Menil Collection; and Gary Garrels, Elise S. Haas Senior Curator Painting and Sculpture, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The presentation of the exhibition at the Metropolitan is organized by Magdalena Dabrowski, Special Consultant in the Museum's Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art.

The 180-page exhibition catalogue features 160 illustrations and essays by Michelle White, Bernice Rose, Gary Garrels, and Magdalena Dabrowski, as well as contributions by Richard Shiff, the Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art at the University of Texas at Austin; and Lizzie Borden, a Los Angeles-based filmmaker and writer. Also included in the catalogue are: an illustrated chronology related to Serra's drawing production; a selected drawing bibliography and exhibition history; and an anthology of selected interviews and writings by the artist, including Serra's notes on drawings. The catalogue is published by The Menil Collection and distributed by Yale University Press.

The exhibition was organized by the Menil Collection, Houston. After its presentation at the Metropolitan, Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective will travel to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (October 15, 2011 – January 17, 2012) and The Menil Collection, Houston (March 2 – June 10, 2012).

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

1000 Fifth Avenue. New York City

www.metmuseum.org