[5] From 1955 to 1957, Overstreet was part of a community of Black artists in Lost Angeles and worked as an animator for Walt Disney Studios.
During the early 1950s he exhibited in galleries, teahouses, and jazz clubs throughout the Bay Area, along with young artists such as James Weeks, Nathan Oliveira, and Richard Diebenkorn.
[5] Johnson believed in the philosophy of Alain Locke, the so-called “father of the Harlem Renaissance” in New York, who advocated for African-American artists to draw from their ancestral legacy for aesthetic sources and inspiration.
[3] He got to know many of the Abstract Expressionist painters from hanging out at Cedar Tavern and felt his real art education came through his relationships with established artists, such as Romare Bearden, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Larry Rivers, Hale A. Woodruff, and Hans Hofmann.
[7] In 1962 Overstreet moved downtown and set up his studio at 76 Jefferson Street, in a loft building where jazz musician Eric Dolphy lived.
[13] Unlike the original character, a domestic servant who exists to please others, Overstreet's Jemima wields a machine gun.
Overstreet recalls of this work: “Larry Rivers saw [the Aunt Jemima painting] around 1970, and he said that if I made it larger, he would include it in the Some American History exhibition at Rice University.
The title Strange Fruit refers to the Billie Holiday rendition of Abel Meeropol's poem and song (first recorded in 1940) about lynchings, in which many black men were killed by hanging.
[10] In particular, the painting may refer to the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, three civil rights workers who disappeared in July 1964 near Philadelphia, Mississippi, not far from Overstreet's home town.
[16] Overstreet has been explicit about the socio-political content and sources of his work, but he also discusses the ropes and geometry of his paintings in terms of his desire to open up and change space.
In the book, Hambidge notes that the Harpedonapte (rope-stretchers) of Egypt discovered the principles of dynamic symmetry and used them to lay out temple plans.
Overstreet used wooden dowels shaped with a jigsaw and hand tools to make intricate stretchers, painting figures in patterns drawn from Aztec, Benin, and Egyptian cultures.
[3] One of his most important bodies of work are the Flight Pattern series of 1971: tarps of canvas are tethered with ropes to the ceiling and floor.
He said that he wanted to retain the most appealing feature of nomadic structures: “their tendency, like birds in flight, to take off, to lift up, rather than be held down” by the ropes that suspended them.
His Icarus paintings were fields of stippled color, stretched on bent conduit pipes into convex, soft-edged shapes, suggesting airplane wings.
[10] In the 1980s, Overstreet worked on a commission to produce a series of 75 steel and neon panels of public art for the San Francisco International Airport.
[21] In his Silver Screens and Meridian Fields of the early 2000s, his interest in transparency led him to paint on steel wire cloth.
The dozens of “screen” paintings which Overstreet has made prefigure many of the ways that young contemporary artists are working in the early 21st century.
[22] Kenkeleba showed young artists who later found national and international acclaim—among them Rose Piper and David Hammons[1] – and also major historical exhibitions of work by important black painters such as Norman Lewis and Edward Mitchell Bannister.