Originally curated by Natalie Dupêcher at the
Menil Collection in Houston and organized by Kaegan Sparks at
Mississippi Museum of Art (MMA),
Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight is the first museum survey in thirty years of Joe Overstreet (b.1933, Conehatta, MS; d.2019, New York), focusing on three phases of the painter’s work in abstraction: shaped canvases from the late 1960s, the
Flight Patterns series from the early 1970s, and large-scale 1990s works inspired by Gorée Island in Senegal.
Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight, the Menil Collection, Houston, January 24–July 13, 2025. Courtesy the Menil Collection. © Fredrik Nilsen Studio. Photo: Fredrik Nelsen
The exhibition will feature the largest installation of Overstreet’s
Flight Patterns since 1972—unstretched canvases painted in vivid colors and suspended from gallery architecture to form three-dimensional geometric constructions. Using the Menil’s foundational research, Sparks and her team will create new interpretive materials for audiences in Jackson, the majority–African American capital city of the artist’s home state. These texts will foreground Overstreet’s formative collaborations with Ishmael Reed, Amiri Baraka, David Henderson, and Sun Ra, and invite questions about how social movements and racial identity intersect with abstraction.
Larry Marshall and his daughter Lauren at the opening for Joe Overstreet, De Luxe Theatre, Houston, August 13, 1972. Courtesy Menil Archives, the Menil Collection, Houston
Sparks is also planning a two-day convening focused on Overstreet’s work as cofounder and codirector of Kenkeleba House, an alternative art space in New York’s East Village. The program will reflect Kenkeleba House’s contributions both to supporting living, local artists of color, and to fostering historical scholarship on Black art. The exhibition at MMA will additionally feature
Laurel (2002), a painting from Overstreet’s
Meridian Fields series named after a Mississippi town and held in the museum’s collection. Through Overstreet’s work and legacy, Sparks continues MMA’s efforts to develop programs that center artist-led institutions, cross-disciplinary networks, and public engagement rooted in Mississippi’s cultural history.
Kaegan Sparks joined the Mississippi Museum of Art as Associate Curator of Exhibitions in 2023. She is a PhD candidate in Art History at The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY) and an alumna of the Whitney Independent Study Program (ISP). Sparks has held predoctoral fellowships at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC); the department of Media and Performance at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, New York); Dia Art Foundation (New York); and the New Museum (New York), where she provided key editorial support on a series of critical anthologies co-published with MIT Press. Her art criticism and book reviews have been published in Artforum, Movement Research Performance Journal, Bookforum, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, and Momus, among other publications. She was previously an adjunct instructor at CUNY, Parsons School of Design, and Barnard College.
Natalie Dupêcher is Associate Curator of Modern Art at the Menil Collection. Recent projects include Janet Sobel: All-Over (2024); Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition (2021–23), the artist’s first major transatlantic retrospective, co-organized by the Menil Collection, MoMA, and the Kunstmuseum Bern; and Photography and the Surreal Imagination (2020). In addition to curating temporary exhibitions, Dupêcher oversees the Menil’s landmark holdings of historical Surrealism. Her writings have been published in Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, Oxford Art Journal, and Print Quarterly, among others. She holds a PhD from Princeton University and an MA from Williams College in the History of Art.