Manuel Wagner Photographie Joe Overstreet \/\/ New York City \/\/ 2012<\/p><\/div>\n
Overstreet was born in 1933 in rural Mississippi \u2013 an area mostly populated by African Americans and Choctaw Native Americans. Like many African American families who were part of the Great Migration, Overstreet\u2019s early life was nomadic, and his early exposure was to Black and Native American rural culture. His father, a mason seeking work, drove his family across the South to find work in Thunderbolt, Georgia and then New York City. Eventually, they joined seven other families traveling west in a caravan for protection, to Washington State and Oregon, before settling in Oakland, California. These experiences would become formative in Overstreet\u2019s work.<\/p>\n
In the 1950s, Overstreet studied at the California School of Fine Arts (San Francisco) and California College of Arts and Crafts (Oakland). He began his career in the Bay Area, and was a fixture of the Beat scene. His Grant Street studio was located near that of Sargent Johnson, a sculptor and painter who became a mentor. Johnson was an adherent of the philosophy of Alain Locke \u2013 the \u201cfather of the Harlem Renaissance,\u201d who advocated that African-American artists look to their ancestral legacy for aesthetic sources and inspiration. By the mid1960s, Overstreet began breaking away from the rectangle of the stretcher and from the narrative of Western art history. Drawing inspiration from the art of North Africa, Islamic mosques, art from Mali and Native American Art, he used wooden dowels shaped with a jigsaw and hand tools to make intricate stretchers, painting in patterns drawn from Aztec, Benin, and Egyptian cultures.<\/p>\n