Joe Overstreet was born in Conehatta, Mississippi, in 1933. He spent his teenage years in California, where he studied art at various institutions, worked as a merchant seaman, and became an early beatnik. When he moved to New York in 1958, his art became abstract expressionist, though in the ’60s he also painted several social protest pieces, including Strange Fruit, inspired by Billie Holiday’s anti-lynching song, and worked as art director for Harlem’s Black Arts Repertory Theater/School. In 1974 he co-founded Kenkeleba House, a gallery space and artists’ center, where he still has his studio and is artistic director.
From 1982 through 1987 Overstreet worked on a seventy-five-panel artwork at San Francisco’s International Airport, and in 1988 produced his semi-figurative Storyville Series of paintings, which explored the origins of jazz in New Orleans. In 1992 a visit to the slave house on Gorée Island, off the coast of Senegal, resulted in the Facing the Door of No Return series. Recent exhibitions, such as 2001’s Silver Screens and 2003’s Meridian Fields, show him experimenting with light and shadow in paintings made on steel wire stretched over canvas.1
I interviewed Joe Overstreet on two occasions. We spoke first in October 2003 in his studio at Kenkeleba House, on New York’s Lower East Side.
GL: Can you tell me a little about your background and your early memories of music?
JO: I was born in Conehatta, Mississippi, a small place where maybe a hundred black families lived. You know the pianist Dorothy Donegan?—her family lived there. The rest of the people in Conehatta were Choctaw Indians. I connected to an uncle who sang the blues. Oh, he could sing! I would hear him coming home at night, way after I should have been asleep; I would hear him singing the blues. He’d probably been to his girlfriend’s house, so I guess he was singing about her. His voice was so beautiful and he sang with so much tenderness. From that, I started to enjoy hearing music.
In 1940 my family moved to Meridian, which was bigger, and I would hear great musicians on the radio, mostly white musicians like Benny Goodman, but I enjoyed listening to them because, from hearing my uncle, I could enjoy the tones and the rhythms. My folks then moved to New York, to work in the shipyards in Hoboken, and I was introduced to the Metropolitan Museum. That was the grandest place on the planet!
GL: You were already interested in art?
JO: I’d been trying to practice drawing everything I could see. That was one of my only pastimes as a child. We moved again to the state of Washington, then to Portland, Oregon, and in 1944 to Oakland, California. When we settled there, I became even more interested in art. Oakland’s a tough place—I tell people I’m from Oakland, they get scared! I went to school with some great athletes and these guys were tough: I wanted to be an artist and I fascinated them by making drawings, so they allowed me to live. [Laughs.] Art became my weapon, a way to make friends. Today I’m still trying to make friends with my art.
In Oakland, I decided to try to become a serious artist. I studied at the California School of Fine Arts and at Oakland Arts and Crafts, but I didn’t do well because I couldn’t afford it. Then I went to sea. I joined the merchant navy, and that shows up in my screen painting: looking at the sea, looking into the depths of the ocean. In 1974 Corrine and I went to Barbados; and swimming in the sea there, it’s so clear, I could see twenty, thirty feet down.2 I’d see fish, I’d see their shadows, I’d see my shadow. That started me painting on wire. And growing up in Mississippi, standing in front of those screen doors there, looking at the fields and wanting to go and play but not being allowed to, in prison almost behind the screen door. I started to reflect on those memories, always thinking of nature, understanding that nature is the first call.
Mississippi is a beautiful place, the trees, the moss, the red clay; there are lovely butterflies, snakes. The landscape gave me a lot to look at, to paint. My work became more and more about nature, less about figuration.
GL: When did you go to New Orleans? I wanted to ask about your Storyville Series of paintings.
JO: That was because of my visit there with my uncle in the early ’40s. We went to New Orleans, my uncle and me, and I got a chance to see the red light district. I was so impressed because I had come from this hick town where there was nobody. New Orleans was massive compared to Meridian—international, good music, good food—it was like a fantasy town for me. I came back from there and really recalled my emotion. The best teacher for painters is to recall their past.
GL: The Storyville paintings are from 1988, aren’t they? Why did you wait so long?
JO: Oh, because I had to learn to paint. [Laughs.] I had so many things to learn.
GL: But by 1988, you’d already been painting for over thirty years!
JO: Well, I still haven’t learned! [Laughs.] I paint what happened. I have a library here and one day I was looking at a book by Ernest Bellocq—he’s a photographer who shot all of the whorehouses and bars in the red light district.3 I was looking at those photos, Mahogany Hall, Professor Clarence Williams, and all of the musicians who had been there. I got the feeling that I needed to do this again; because I had tried to do it in the ’50s and I didn’t like the result. So I made another attempt.
GL: When you start a series, how much do you plan in advance? Do you know how many paintings there will be?
JO: No. I paint what I paint. I enjoy seeing. I like for the painting to always tell me what it’s doing. I like to discover, and I improvise. That’s what jazz had me feeling: the reason for painting is the idea of discovery and improvisation—because musicians always use that as the final tool; it lets them know that they’re reflecting themselves. I use the same forces for painting, that let me know when I discover the music, the rhythms, in the painting; that allow me to know that the painting is legitimate, so I can pursue the next problem. Each day I create a new problem for myself.
GL: When you painted the Storyville Series, wasn’t this the first figurative painting you’d done in a long time?
JO: Yeah, I had been an abstract expressionist painter from the time I came to New York from California in 1958. I grew up as a figurative and nature painter. I wanted to paint trees, to paint natural things in my early years. Then, in San Francisco, I became sophisticated: I saw Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, all these painters doing things I couldn’t imagine. I had to go and investigate. It took me years to investigate that, color field painting … It’s taken a lot of years trying to work out what art meant to different cultures, different people; looking at Japanese screens, Indian miniatures, Islamic architecture. I enjoy what people do in art, how they trace themselves.
I got an opportunity to meet Diego Rivera once, which was the greatest thing; that kept me alive for years! I became close friends with Willem de Kooning. When I came to New York, I was poor as hell—I could barely eat or pay the rent— and he helped me more than any artist has ever helped me. He was a great artist, a great human being. I knew people from the Cedar Street Bar here in New York … See, I was an original beatnik back in San Francisco. I was with Kerouac and all those people. I had a little gallery and studio on Grant Avenue—very near Sargent Johnson—where I was trying to be a painter. And Bobby Kaufman was one of my closest friends; he and I came to New York together, and he knew a lot of jazz musicians. Here I got to be exposed to things that would never have happened in California. I became more of an international seeker in New York, looking at the world in a different light. So I stayed. I’ve been in New York for nearly fifty years now. My kids were born here. I wanted to be with the action. I never had any problem with understanding figurative painting, abstract painting—it was all painting to my mind. Still is.
GL: Okay, but in the Storyville Series, why did you revert to figuration?
JO: Because of the music, the culture. I wanted to show the prostitutes, to show the music. Because I read that the whores had kept the music alive. By god, that was important! The piano players and the musicians would get their paychecks from the prostitutes, so they kept the music alive. I thought, well, those women did a deal more there; they helped to preserve the culture. Though some people might … they’d say culture must be more genteel. But it happened in the way life happens. So we have the culture, we got Buddy Bolden, we got a lot of good things from that situation. I wanted to express that, and in a way where people could see it. To bring it to life.
Figure 10.1 Joe Overstreet, The Hawk, for Horace Silver. c. 1957. Oil on masonite, 28 in. × 36 in. Courtesy of Kenkeleba Gallery.
GL: Can I ask about some particular works of yours, which seem to have some reference to music in the title or in the painting? One of your earlier paintings was The Hawk, for Horace Silver (Figure 10.1).
JO: Yeah, that was in 1957. I was in San Francisco and I went to the Black Hawk club to see Horace Silver for the first time. I couldn’t believe anybody could move their hands that fast; he looked like a spider.
GL: I read that the shapes in the top right corner of the painting are a parody of cubism.4
JO: I don’t know about that. I always enjoyed Picasso, I enjoyed the cubist painters, but I never looked at my work as influenced by cubism.
GL: Well, I noticed that you gave all the musicians in the picture cube-shaped heads!
JO: That’s because musicians would always say, “You’re a square.” They referred to me as “Oh, he’s a square.” In the ’50s square was a big thing. I always thought of that as being a part of the rhetoric that musicians used. Musicians are extremely psychic and mysterious; they live in little communities and they don’t let anybody in, so you never know what they’re doing or what they’re thinking. [Laughs.]
GL: So it’s not a joke about cubism?
JO: No, it was about the musicians calling me a square. [Laughs.]
GL: Corrine told me you were a good friend of Eric Dolphy’s. Did you meet him in California?
JO: No. I had a loft at 76 Jefferson Street, here in New York, downtown. This musician, a French horn player, lived in the loft across the way. He came up to me one day—there was an empty apartment below me—he said, “Joe, I have a wonderful, wonderful person who wants that space.” I said, “Who?” He said, “Eric Dolphy. You and Eric have the same birthday.” So I said, well, the gods are sending him to me. But the devil had sent him! [Laughs.] He practiced twenty-four hours a day. He never slept—the guy would never go to sleep. The things he did were pretty wonderful, but I used to bang on the floor: “Shut up, shut up.” He would have all these crazy jazz musicians hanging around practicing every day. He got a tape recording of these exotic birds from Africa and he would practice … You know, the tape would go on, I would hear the birds, and then I would hear him. He played all the wind instruments—flutes, clarinets, sax—he played every damn instrument there was! So I would hear the birds, then I would hear him, on each instrument in turn. But when he got ready to play a gig, he’d put a ticket under my door. That was the payback for all the sleepless nights. I didn’t go to the gigs very often; when he was out was the only time I could get any sleep.
I remember the day he left. He looked at me and said, “You can rest for a while. I’m going to Europe on tour.” He never came back. He died in Germany. He had a kind of lump up here [points to forehead]; I used to say, that’s your third eye. He was a wonderful person, so dedicated. I felt so hurt for so many years that I had not given him all the peace he deserved.
GL: I heard he used to practice the same note, over and over, for hours at a time.5
JO: I had to listen to that for two years, where he’d play that one note. He was a devoted musician. In San Francisco, I lived around a lot of musicians, but he was the most dedicated of any I knew. Eric … I know he’s in heaven. He was such a purist. I’ve got a lot of respect for Eric, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor … they have their own ideas. See that photograph up there? That’s Walter Davis Jr. and Buhania, Art Blakey. I look at that picture every day.
GL: This was the music you listened to?
JO: I listen to everything. I listen to Hank Williams, Diana Ross, Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. Annie Ross is a good friend of mine. I’ve got a painting of her back there. Musicians have been my greatest sounding board in the sense that they’re more intelligent than other people, other black people, or any other white people, that I’ve ever talked to. They made more sense, they had more compassion, and they were not afraid to struggle. Not money, not anything, came before the music.
Sun Ra and I were very close. Sun Ra and I started the Jazzmobile in Harlem. Baraka, LeRoi Jones, and I were sitting there, and Baraka said, “Ain’t nobody comin’ to the Black Arts to see Sonny play.” We called him Sonny. So I said, “If the mountain won’t go to Mohammed, then Mohammed got to go to the mountain.” I built this flatbed truck and took Sun Ra’s band all over Harlem. We’d close off the street and play.
I used to go over and hang out with Sun Ra. He and a few band members lived in a small apartment over on East Third Street. They were very poor then; they only had one bed and they used to take turns to sleep in the bed, except Sonny’d sit in the chair all the time. One day I was there and Sonny was in the chair. I said to the others, why doesn’t he ever sleep in the bed? They told me, “Sun Ra doesn’t need to sleep.” I said, “Well, he sure sounds like he’s snoring to me.” [Laughs.]
GL: Okay, the next painting I’d like to ask about is Strange Fruit, from 1964, ’65 (Figure 10.2).
JO: That one I got from Billie Holiday: the black bodies swinging in the poplar trees.6
GL: Was the painting done in response to the murder of those three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi: Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner?
JO: Well, Conehatta, where I was born, is only about seventy miles south of there. The painting was more a response to Billie Holiday, but it did fit the time. It fit the time because, in America, all of my life, I’d heard about lynching. It was a fear, and she expressed it in that song, but it was always there. So it was about that fear, a black man being lynched: Emmett Till, the Scottsboro Boys … There’s always been that fear in America, if you’re a black man. So that was what I made the painting about.
I made a painting of Aunt Jemima with a machine gun in 1964. Aunt Jemima with a big machine gun, shooting pancakes. [Laughs.] And I made a painting about those four little girls who were firebombed in Alabama. At that time, I felt dedicated to making social protest paintings about the history of black people in America.
GL: There’s an essay by Thomas McEvilley where he talks about your belief that art is universal … 7
JO: It is.
GL: I was just wondering if you saw any contradiction between that idea and the Black Arts …
JO: Wait, wait, wait. I think when you look at Catholic Christian art, that’s universal, isn’t it? When you look at Michelangelo, sixteenth-century art, is that not universal? Isn’t that social? If you look at Japanese screen painting or Indian miniatures, isn’t that universal? I think any culture has the right to stand in the same space as any other culture, whether it’s accepted in the West or not. I don’t think Aunt Jemima with a machine gun is any less universal than what I’m doing now. I believe in my heart that everything I’ve tried to do, I’ve tried to do it to help all human beings. That’s the universality I’m talking about. I would prefer you to understand my true self.
Figure 10.2 Joe Overstreet, Strange Fruit. c. 1965. Oil on linen, 46 in. × 40 in. Courtesy of Kenkeleba Gallery.
GL: Well, what about the idea of a black aesthetic? Some critics might argue that the Black Arts people tried to use it as a form of racial exclusion.
JO: I probably believe in a black aesthetic. But, in regard to the Black Arts Repertory Theater and School, it was Baraka’s decision to keep whites out. My aesthetic was that I was there to help black people with the little talent I had at the time. That was my only concern; I never got involved with the internal politics there. I wanted the Black Arts movement to help Harlem and the people of Harlem.
But Baraka … he says exactly what he feels and he’s prepared to pay the price. That’s what I call a poet! Miles was like that too. He said what he felt and he didn’t care what people thought. He was a mean bastard too, some of the time. But Miles was daring, and so was Baraka. I admire that, though I think they both went over the top at times.
GL: What do you think of Miles’s paintings?
JO: Miles called me up one time. [Puts on raspy voice.] “Hey Joe, how ’bout doing an exhibition together? We could have a big opening, lot of press.” I said, okay, Miles, on one condition: at the opening, I play the trumpet. He put the phone down. I think I got him good. [Laughs.] He was a hopeless painter, hopeless. I mean, he wasn’t even a painter; all he did were stick figures.
GL: Your painting Boat of Ra, was that to do with Sun Ra? (Figure 10.3).
JO: Yeah. Sun Ra used to tell me, all black people are from Saturn. [Laughs.] That was Sun Ra, Boat of Ra; it’s not so much about Egypt.
Figure 10.3 Joe Overstreet, Boat of Ra. c. 1967. Acrylic on shaped canvas, 44¼ in. × 65½ in. Courtesy of Kenkeleba Gallery.
GL: How was that piece done? It’s a shaped canvas, isn’t it?
JO: There are four panels that are tied together, different kinds of shapes. In the mid- to late ’60s I began to make shaped canvases. I made one called North Star, which fits together. I wasn’t influenced by Frank Stella: a lot of people think that Frank Stella played a part … He was popular then. He’s a fine artist but I’m not overwhelmed by Frank Stella. I see anybody make a statement, I’m not afraid of that statement.
In the late ’60s I did rope pieces—pieces that were hung on ropes, not stretchers—because of my heritage, and how the Native Americans moved their tents, rolled ’em up and moved things around. Then I became interested in Egyptian rope stretchers and how they built the pyramids. But nomadic people … I felt like a nomad myself at times, and in those years there was homelessness, a lot of black people were homeless. We could survive with our art by rolling it up and moving all over, and I tried to show that.
One of the things I found out with the geometry—like the geometry in jazz or the geometry in nature—I could take a shape and improvise on it: I could redesign a square, make it an octagon, make these types of shapes from a square. I would sew the shapes; I’d take the square, cut it diagonally, and resew the shapes. I’m always concerned about the effect of the rhythm in any piece, almost like drapes; not like Sam Gilliam, more to do with the geometrical shapes I was dealing with. So the ropes were part of the geometry; and the shadows were too, because these pieces were in relief from the wall, so the shadows and the ropes were parts of the space.
You could hang this art any place. You didn’t need money to build a home. I tried to create a reflection of what I felt in my past had run parallel: Native Americans, African nomadic people, people who had no homes—I felt my life had run parallel to these lives. Most of the things that had been in my past had been denied or rejected, which is still the case.
Today I work with wire steel because it gives me a sense of my self-identity, which makes me more excited about being myself than imitating Turner or Gainsborough or whoever; it makes me be whatever I can be by my own self-effort. This is not meant to insult or discard your culture; I’m not interested in that. And I think my painting’s changed; I’m finding my way, trying to express who I am as a human being, my experiences in the past. I’m not interested in finding myself, I’m interested in building myself.8
GL: But you do take things from other cultures too?
JO: Oh, I think Van Gogh was the greatest painter of all. I mean, why are we sitting here in this world? We all have a past. I think that I take the idea of looking through wire and shadow from chiaroscuro. I know a lot about light; I take the light and use it. Western art is all about light, coming from chiaroscuro, light and dark; all the way up to photography, up to Monet. So I’m not afraid to have that as something I like to see. I enjoy seeing Monet, Renoir, the French artists; I love to look at Goya, Velásquez; Rembrandt is one of my favorite artists. I want my own voice, though; I don’t want anyone saying, “Oh, he’s a little Rembrandt.” I want to be Joe Overstreet. It cuts through all class and color.
GL: Let’s talk about Jazz in 4/4 Time (Figure 10.4). This is another shaped canvas?
JO: It’s about shapes, four different shapes and four designs put together. I used to hear all those jazz guys say, step it up to four/four time. So I felt obligated to step it up.
Figure 10.4 Joe Overstreet, Jazz in 4/4 Time. 1967. Acrylic on shaped canvas, 65 in. × 65 in. Courtesy of Kenkeleba Gallery.
GL: Your breaking out of the rectangle, out of the standard frame, where did that come from?
JO: I think from frustration. In the mid ’60s I felt abstract expressionism had pushed painting all the way to the boundaries, and there was no place to go except outside the framework. Some painters, Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg, had started to move outside the rectangle. We had an obligation, as painters, to keep up with our time, I felt. I still feel that way. We have an obligation as human beings to keep up with our time.
GL: Do you mean in terms of formal change? That now you need to keep up with, say, computer art, new technology?
JO: Not technology, that’s not what I meant. When I say my time, I have an obligation to know that people are dying in Iraq today. I have an obligation to the fact that people are starving and dying in Africa. I have an obligation to understand that; to know what my feeling is about that.
GL: Does this mean you try to put those things in your paintings?
JO: Not necessarily. What I paint has to reflect what I feel; it has to be an emotional recall. I don’t have to make a painting to illustrate the problems that TV illustrates. When I say keeping up with my time, I believe that, whatever is happening to people in the world, I have an obligation to try to understand why it’s happening. I may not be able to do anything about it, but I certainly want to know why it’s happening. People are dying, people are suffering, and as long as we don’t pay any attention, we’re the ones at fault. That’s what I mean; not technology. I don’t know anything about computer art, though I don’t like it when I’ve seen it. But I don’t like a lot of things. [Laughs.]
GL: Can you tell me about Seven Blues for Spring? This was later, in 1978, I think.
JO: I had a studio on the Bowery and I was sitting in the park there—there’s a beautiful park on Delancey and Chrystie—and I was looking at the spring. I enjoyed making the painting because I could see all these blues and yellows as they were coming out in the color of the trees. There was a lot of action there.
What I did was interesting because I had a lot of Liquitex acrylic paint and I’d pour it out onto plastic; I’d pour the colors out, then after the colors were dry, I’d peel it off and glue it to the canvas. That’s how the painting was made. But I’d go out to the park, and somehow there were seven blues in the air; the blues in the springtime. I enjoyed looking at the blues in the painting. I used different shades: cobalt, ultramarine … you know, blue’s not really a color. Blue’s an illusion, a trick on the eye. The earth colors are difficult; blue is easy. A red painting is hard as hell to make, a yellow painting, even a green painting. But blue will always work for you, because it doesn’t really exist. I mean, you look at it and it’ll do anything.
It’s a big painting, that one, six feet, eight feet. I like big paintings; it’s a challenge to keep the rhythms. In painting there’s a beat. The beat has to go on, has to maintain itself. When I see the beat in the painting, it lets me know the painting is good. That’s the only way. You have to stay with the beat, keep it up, keep the fire burning. And the beat isn’t the same as the beat in music. You can’t drag the beat in music, but in painting dragging doesn’t cover up the beat. You look at Picasso, you look at Van Gogh, you understand what that means. It’s a gift to see it that way, to understand the rhythm of the painting.9
GL: Okay, Storyville … you mentioned when we were in the gallery earlier that Ishmael Reed was a good friend of yours.
JO: I took Ishmael to California with me. I went to Cal State at Hayward to teach in ’71. Ishmael stayed out there in Oakland. He’s a sensitive person; he helped me in a lot of ways to understand other perception. Writers do that—they have a different perspective.
GL: Did his ideas on hoodoo influence your Storyville paintings?
JO: Oh, hoodoo’s from New Orleans. Marie Laveau probably had a lot to do with the concept of hoodoo. I went to her grave—I looked at it and I decided I didn’t want to go near the thing. I was only interested in how the whores paid the musicians, and the bars, the gambling, and the corruption of New Orleans that allowed the music to survive.
GL: You have Marie Laveau in one of the paintings, The Hoodoo. 10
JO: Yeah. I can’t remember … I don’t know how important she was to Ishmael. I’m sure she was: Ishmael reads everything. He’s a wonderful writer. I’ve had to align myself—being stupid, as I am—I had to align myself with smart people. [Laughs.] I made a painting of Ishmael in 1967. I called it The Chairman of the Hoodoo Church. He has it in his house.11 He always investigates things; he’s a researcher, a scholar.
GL: When you’re painting, do you play music?
JO: I have music on. I get tired and go to sleep and I listen to some music to wake me up.
GL: Do you think it influences your work?
JO: No, because I’ve been listening to music for so long. And I’m concentrating on the painting. It’s a different mind-set.
GL: Then why play it?
JO: It relaxes me. I sit here and listen and look at what I’m painting. But then I block the music off. I start to paint and I won’t hear anything. Or I’ll go and bang at the piano.
GL: You play?
JO: I don’t play. I play nonsense. I enjoy it but I don’t really play. I mean, Ishmael’s learned to play the piano. Last time he was here he played two Bud Powell tunes for me—that’s really an accomplishment. I know a great musician, a concert pianist. I did a painting for him and he offered me a year’s lessons. I think I may take him up on it. Then when Ishmael comes to visit, I’ll play. [Laughs.] I’ll fix him!
I think music is influential to my life, as in being able to not get depressed, not giving up, not feeling sorry for myself. I think that from a child, from listening to my uncle in the night, singing the blues, feeling good, feeling happy, I think that’s something that’s carried through my life.
GL: In the gallery earlier, I think you were comparing your paintings’ structure with musical intervals.
JO: Well, music is made up of beats and scales and notes, half notes, quarter notes. I lay out my paintings in the same way, to numbers, rhythms.
GL: This is the Fibonacci system you use?12
JO: Fibonacci is all scales and numbers, so I would associate it with music in the sense that it’s laid out as numbers. My paintings, ’cause I’m laying them out to a structure, you could associate that with music. Not that I’m trying to play music with my paintings. One of the things is that I’m alone here. I’m by myself. Musicians have each other to talk to. They work together, they have a camaraderie. Painters are isolated.
GL: In the gallery you also mentioned that sometimes you saw the primary colors as major tones.
JO: I don’t want to get into that because I don’t understand what color C sharp would look like. I would imagine it’d be bright red. But it could be blue, could be orange.
GL: For you it’s bright red?
JO: For me it’s bright red. Louis Armstrong would certainly hit that bright red note when he’d go for a high C.
GL: Do you associate particular colors with particular notes?
JO: I try not to. I try to avoid that. But I’m thinking, if I listen to him pop that note, it would be red in my eyes. I would hear Miles as a deep blue, indigo blue, in space. But I don’t want to get into that because then I’m trying to listen and make paintings. And that won’t work. A painting is a painting.
When I returned to New York the following spring, Joe Overstreet kindly agreed to a second interview. I wanted to ask him more about his Strange Fruit and Storyville Series paintings, remarkable works in their own right and of special interest in the context of The Hearing Eye because of their relationship to music. We met in April 2004 and talked in various locations in Kenkeleba House as Joe moved around, pulling out different paintings to show me, including the original Strange Fruit, which is even more powerful and dramatic when you are close enough to appreciate the thickness of the paint and the intensity of the markings on the painting’s surface.
GL: I’d like to talk to you more about specific paintings that are related to music. You have some that are named after song titles: Strange Fruit, St. James Infirmary, Garden Blues.
JO: Strange Fruit is interesting because of the notion of music and, I guess, pain: it was a very painful scene. I made a painting where I had a rope, only the rope was taut, and the bodies … not bodies, but jeans and tennis shoes, were swinging, the body was suggested. I guess music is part of my inspiration, of my wanting to make art.
But, ah, I think St. James Infirmary is … I always liked listening to Louis Armstrong sing. He had that rough voice. And it was almost like it was an evil spirit, you know, the infirmary burning.13 One of the things about music, it expresses a lot of different emotions; blues expresses a lot of pain, a lot of anger, a lot of sorrow, and most of our hardships from relationships. Basic feeling.
GL: Did you ever see Billie Holiday live?
JO: I saw her not long before she died. She came to San Francisco and played at the Black Hawk club in 1956, I think, or 1957.
GL: Was she still a powerful singer then?
JO: Oh yes. I never really thought of her as a great singer; I thought of her as a great orator. Like a storyteller. You know, Sarah Vaughan could sing; Billie Holiday … her voice was gravelly but her timing was wonderful. She was very beautiful to watch and she took control of her stories. I was much younger then and captivated by her reputation. Her reputation was enormous at that time: she was “Lady,” everyone was totally overwhelmed by her presence. But I don’t profess to be a jazz expert by any means; I’m just a lover, a listener.
GL: That’s okay. I’d like to hear about how you respond to music, how it affects your work.
JO: Music allows me to work, to live. It keeps the beat going. I think jazz has certainly helped to keep us alive, to keep us inspired; and the blues too, rhythm and blues, rock ’n’ roll, all of those things. It’s probably our greatest contribution to America, to the world. Music has helped us, African American people and white, to bridge our cultural differences in this country.
GL: Do you think “Strange Fruit” was important in that context? Not only because it was written by a white person and sung by a black person, but also because it brought lynching under the spotlight. I think it was one of the first times the subject had been broached in the context of a popular song.14
JO: It was a story about a tragedy. And I think the only performer who could have put it in its proper context was Billie Holiday. With her voice and her background, the background of her pain. One of the things I’m learning more and more: it’s impossible to bring alive something that you don’t feel. It’s impossible to express a story or a feeling that you don’t have an understanding of.
GL: Did she sing “Strange Fruit” when you saw her?
JO: I don’t remember what she sang. I know the song from the album; I probably have it upstairs in my collection.15 But music is something that is so personal for me, in the sense that I’m ashamed of myself for even mentioning it, because I’ve known some great musicians, and if I tried to talk about … I mean, I would never sit and talk to my friend Jackie McLean about music. I’d be afraid! [Laughs.] We talk about painting.
GL: Okay, let’s talk about painting. When we talked about your Strange Fruit last year, you said then it was to do with the fear of lynching. Given that you were born in Mississippi, was that a very personal …
JO: Part of my life? No. It was only … you know when I really felt the most outraged at that time? I was in John Chamberlain’s studio—you know him? He’s a famous American sculptor—I was in his studio in ’63, ’64, about the time I painted Strange Fruit, and I picked up a magazine. There was a photograph where they had lynched—down in Kentucky or some place, I can’t remember—but they had these three bodies hanging, and the people were sitting out eating lunch.16 It’s a famous photograph. These were three young black men they had lynched, and one of them sort of reminded me of my brother. He was like an innocent kid and they maimed and disfigured him and the neck was stretched.
That and the song tied the images together. Because I saw this photo, because I could hear the song, I could paint the image and I could title it in the correct way. A lot of inspirations we have are fleeting ideas; we get a glimpse, a slight glimpse, and that’s all we need sometimes to open up a whole universe for us.
GL: But as a child in Mississippi, you felt no personal fear?
JO: I had no real reason to fear then: I had a family that was very secure, very protective. I do remember the stories that were told, that I overheard, which were very frightening, about how people were treated. But I couldn’t be who I am today if I’d suffered such fear that I’d be afraid to reach out. I’m glad they protected me, so I’m not afraid to view people, one on one. I think that’s the only way we can look at each other. You look at me as who you feel I am; I see you as who I feel you are. And we didn’t have that, black people in the South—we weren’t allowed that freedom. That’s all it is—freedom to look at people without fear.
The idea of civil rights … that was a personal struggle, because I’m a black man who was trying to live in America; to live as a citizen and be part of what that was, and needing that opportunity for others. This was something the civil rights movement made very clear to my age group: we had to protest. We had to vote. Our children had to be admitted to schools.
GL: I don’t know if it’s possible to explain this, but when you decided to paint Strange Fruit, a picture on that kind of subject, how did you decide how to paint it?
JO: One of the things about painting, I’d have to say one of the problems, if you have in your mind what the painting is going to be, is how you’re going to execute the painting. See, painting is about technique. No matter what anyone says, if it’s not executed well, no one’s going to look at it.
GL: It has to work as a painting?
JO: It has to work as a painting, as an art form. That’s very important. To execute an image takes a certain amount of skill and training. To bring out the impact of a feeling takes an extreme amount of emotion, of recall—emotional recall. So the two have to work together somehow. You have to have the technical ability to bring out the emotional recall.
At that time I was making a painting about civil rights and I was making it with a palette knife; I was using a lot of flat surfaces; I was trying to bring the paint to where I could make it strong. My feelings always had to determine how the problem was resolved.
GL: Ann Gibson has talked about the rope in Strange Fruit … 17
JO: It’s at a diagonal!
GL: Yeah, and much of the painting is aligned to that diagonal, so the whole scene has an out-of-kilter feel, like the world has gone askew, morally askew.
JO: [Nods.] And I made that rope really taut. I tried to express all the hatred that goes into lynching in the tautness of that rope.
GL: Whereas the legs are limp, and they hang down vertically. Did you feel that showing the whole bodies would be too horrific?
JO: There’s no need to show the whole bodies. You know they’re black. But I put in the jeans and sneakers to show these were young guys, kids.
GL: And you turned the song title around, by giving the Klan those weird hoods?
JO: Right. Those guys are strange, and they’re like fruit, their hoods, like apples, oranges. I got them in all different colors. I had fun doing that.
GL: Were you alluding at all to the Aaron Douglas painting, An Idyll of the Deep South, where he depicts a lynching scene in a similar way—just the legs dangling?18
JO: I don’t know about that. I love his paintings; I’ve probably seen it, but I never paid that much attention to it. I love his silhouettes, his outlines. Aaron Douglas was a very interesting painter.
GL: I read a statement of yours, I think it was about Facing the Door of No Return, where you said you were trying to put together the pain and the beauty.19 And talking about Strange Fruit, you’ve just said a painting has to work as art—is that where the beauty comes in? Does the painting still have to be beautiful?
JO: The beauty is in the process, I think. The action is the beauty; that I get up and do something, that’s beautiful. The subject matter is something else, because to recall the emotion, I want to evoke what’s in me, I want it to come out. So if I’m making these colors that I think are lovely, and the execution of the line is beautiful, that’s the beauty of doing it. But I want the feeling to come out; I want myself to feel … not necessarily anger, but I want to be truthful to the way I really felt.
I went to Gorée in 1992. I went into the Slave House and I looked at the size of the room. I paced it out, twelve feet by ten feet—that’s the size of the rooms where the male slaves were kept, thirty or forty people in a twelve by ten room. I thought, oh my god! It affected me—and I’m not oversensitive; I’ve lived in New York City for forty years—but that got to me. I came back here on December twenty-fourth and I started to work, I started to make these huge stretchers. Then I got a stepladder and I painted sixteen, eighteen hours a day for a year and a half. I made twelve huge paintings, twelve feet by ten feet. For the paintings, I was referring to photographs I had, to memories; and in the process of painting, the land, the people, the fruit, the fish, everything became beautiful. The pain was in the size and the geometry, that was the pain in the painting. It’s a hidden grid, it’s hidden in the painting, but it’s always there, because that’s what inspired me to make the painting.
I made those paintings and I was so exhausted. I’d exhausted my feeling about what I saw at the Slave House. That’d been all I could think of: I dreamed of skulls, I heard the moans and cries of those human beings. Everything that I had felt, I exhausted that in my paintings.
Now I look at the TV and see people killing and dying and burning up— I’m trying to figure it out. Do I want that to be in my painting, do I want to evoke that? I’ve been thinking a lot about the war in Iraq in the last month or two—do I have an obligation to paint something? Will anybody want it? Because I felt that obligation in the 1960s, I felt that when I painted the bombing of the Birmingham church, those four little girls who were killed. I think we need strong artistic statements. Take Guernica: Picasso wasn’t afraid to do it; he wasn’t afraid to express it. I think people looked at that painting and they felt what was happening; they understood the pain, the terror, the torment. It was very direct.
Jazz has that pain individually. We look at our music over the years; we go through a lot of those expressions in our time. I don’t know. I feel I have a responsibility to do something about what I feel is happening in the world. I’m torn. I’m looking for something … I don’t want it to be pretty; at the same time I don’t want it to be destructive. It’s hard to express all these ideas, all these feelings; it’s so confusing and I don’t want to be hypocritical about it.
GL: When you say you’re looking … I mean, you have done this in the past. Isn’t Strange Fruit this kind of painting?
JO: It’s different today because it’s more complicated. Strange Fruit was my history. It was about being black in America and being lynched; the fear of who I am in this country, why people hate me because of who I am. This war is nothing to do with that. I could be sitting here now with you and a damn airplane could come through here and we have nothing to do with it. That’s my paranoia.
The World Trade Center was only half a mile from here—it could have been me. I went up on the roof of this building and I watched those towers collapse. I saw … I could feel all those people, ’cause I used to go in there, and they had no reason to die. That was the worst day of my life, when I saw that thing go down, and I could picture all those people I’d seen. I knew a lot of people had died that day. I saw the smoke coming up.
Then they went to get Saddam Hussein rather than Osama bin Laden, who was the one that really hurt us, hurt those innocent people, but ain’t nobody bothered with him now. Innocent kids are going to Iraq and dying … 800 kids have died over there. It doesn’t make sense. It’s very painful. And it can’t end—it’s gonna be a hundred-year war. You can’t resolve it with bombs. All you create is more hatred. Hatred begets hatred.
I look at that, and what’s my responsibility? Making a picture? Well, it was easy for me to make a picture in the ’60s because I understood it clearly; I knew why I was feeling afraid. I don’t understand anything about what this is.
GL: Isn’t it all right to express confusion, if that’s what you really feel?
JO: That’s all you can express, if that’s what you feel. We have so many problems in this country; there’s race, there’s age … I know people older than me who are on Social Security and it’s not enough to buy their medication each month. Why are we doing this to people?
I don’t know. I’ve been very fortunate. God has blessed me. He blessed me with a wonderful wife, who’s very intelligent; he blessed me with a big room here, so I can sit and be interviewed by a friend from England about painting. [Laughs.]
GL: That reminds me, we should be talking about your painting. [Laughs.]
JO: Oh, I get frustrated with painting. Painting is very hard.
GL: Tell me about those Storyville paintings, Garden Blues and St. James Infirmary.
JO: Okay, Louis Armstrong … it took me a long time to hear him; I didn’t have the ear. I couldn’t understand that much. You know who Tommy Turrentine is? Tommy Turrentine and I were sitting in the park one day—this was years ago, in the ’60s—and Tommy played trumpet. So I said, “Tommy, who’s the best trumpet player? Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, or Louis Armstrong?” He jumped up, he said, “Pops, Pops! If you don’t know that, you don’t know nothing.” [Laughs.] I said, why is he so great? “He can hit triple high Cs, he can hit three of ’em in a row—they can’t do that!” He got so excited telling me what Louis Armstrong can do, so I started paying more attention. When I got to this painting, St. James Infirmary, I remembered his voice and how he played the tune, and it’s like the one thing that I wanted was the C notes.20 It’s blue, all blue, with yellows and oranges coming through (Figure 10.5).
GL: You told me previously you saw high C as bright red.
Figure 10.5 Joe Overstreet, St. James Infirmary. 1988. From the Storyville Series. Oil on canvas, 78 in. × 64 in. Private collection. Courtesy of Kenkeleba Gallery.
JO: Red, right, but there’s blue in the background. It’s the high notes, the high C that I wanted to get in the painting.
GL: So the painting is of Louis Armstrong?
JO: I would say it’s more than anything about my thinking about the devil, and the infernal, and all of these painful things; and then Louis Armstrong and “Mack the Knife” and those things he would do. See, I was denied Louis Armstrong for many years. In fact, when I was young, in San Francisco, we thought he was Dixieland. The people we listened to out there were Sonny Stitt, Lester Young, those people. But I never heard Louis Armstrong because I thought of him as old-time. I only started listening in the ’60s, after Tommy Turrentine told me how great the guy was.
The painting came out of all that, and my visit to New Orleans with my uncle, and reading about Buddy Bolden; you know, that trumpet sound that goes all the way back to New Orleans. You know how the trumpet got there? After the Civil War, the soldiers went through and gave the instruments to the whores in exchange for sex. That’s how the musicians got them, the trumpets, the slide trombones; the women gave the instruments to the musicians that were around.
GL: You also have the figure of the pianist in a lot of the Storyville paintings.
JO: That’s the professor. The professor was always in the background, in the houses.
GL: Tell me about Garden Blues, because you dedicated that to Clarence Williams (Figure 10.6).
JO: He was a professor on the piano. He had his own publishing company.21 I’m trying to get the painting in my head … I’ll have to go and look ’cause I can’t remember. When I made these paintings, I had gone into this book on Storyville, with the Edward Bellocq photos, and one of the things that struck me from the book was posters: they would put posters up where they would characterize the girls by nationality, by how much color they had—octoroon, quadroon, or whatever—and by their price. At first, I wasn’t thinking of Storyville. I wanted to do something about the music from New Orleans. Then I found out about Sidney Story, the politician who had tried to close down this district because of the prostitution, and how the prostitutes had supported the musicians, guys like Clarence Williams, who played in the whorehouses where they’d be paid $100 a night while the clubs would pay them just a dollar or two. And I read about the black woman who had owned Mahogany Hall, Lulu White; they made a film about her where she was played by that famous white actress, eh … Mae West.22 I had all this information and I wanted to say something about the music, so I made the paintings.
Figure 10.6 Joe Overstreet, Garden Blues. 1988. From the Storyville Series. Oil on canvas, 78 in. × 72 in. Courtesy of Kenkeleba Gallery.
What I was doing at first, I was trying to put them on paper. One day I put the paint onto newspaper, put that onto the canvas, and when I lifted it off there was a wonderful texture on the canvas. I always felt that music has so much texture; you can hear the texture in the music. I wanted the colors to breathe and the music gave me a perfect image for that.23
Figure 10.7 Joe Overstreet, Second Line I. 1988. From the Storyville Series. Oil on canvas, 78 in. × 72 in. Courtesy of Kenkeleba Gallery.
GL: Was this the first time you had used that technique?
JO: Yeah, I liked the texture, the relief feeling. I had been trying to make monoprints and it gave me that monoprint look, a wet look, and I enjoyed seeing that. So I would take newspaper and I would draw out a figure, stick it up on the canvas and then I’d make a repetition. I enjoy repetition in painting. And repetition is one of the things that music has always come back to: it starts, it goes, it comes back.
Figure 10.8 (opposite) Joe Overstreet, Second Line II. 1988. From the Storyville Series. Oil on canvas, 78 in. × 64 in. Courtesy of Kenkeleba Gallery.
GL: Second Line I and Second Line II are about the New Orleans funeral, the march to the graveyard and then the procession back?
JO: Right. I like Second Line I because it’s almost like the evil eye looking out (Figure 10.7). It could be like Marie Laveau’s spirit. The spirit is looking out at the march. Then Second Line II is where they’re coming back from the cemetery (Figure 10.8). All of that was part of the New Orleans story. Also I wanted to put in those wrought iron railings, to honor the African iron workers. For me, the paintings are like a story, a sequence that’s continuous, so the women are sitting there, the professor is there, the chandelier is there, the French influence. I always associate a chandelier with the French.
The painting on the cover of the catalogue, The Arrival, this is Legba. Legba arrives, and there is a young prostitute, who’s torn, who’s sitting in this very decorative room, designed for prostitution. She’s turning toward the door, and she’s frightened. In my mind, she hears the footsteps, and this crude, crude shadow comes into the door. She’s lost, lost in her horror. It’s a story of horror because this is a trick—but is he? Is it a demon, is it the devil?
So that was a compassionate painting, a very emotional painting for me. Because it could be my granddaughter—it could’ve been my mother, my sister—it could be any woman who’s caught in that position, where she has to sell her soul. This painting really meant a lot to me when I first painted it. I have it here somewhere. I haven’t looked at it for years.24
I wanted to record that, and the posters in the Storyville book, how they advertised the women. I don’t know if I captured that but I certainly had a notion about how I wanted to paint it. I wanted to control space. I didn’t want the space running … and the space is very controlled in the paintings, I feel, because of the way I applied the paint to the canvas.
GL: You said you have The Arrival here. Do you have many paintings here?
JO: Yes. I have my paintings and my collection: I have a large collection of African sculpture. I want to build a place at the back here; I want my work and my collection and other works to be preserved, because it’s the only thing we have. If I don’t do it, I don’t know if anybody else will. It’s like the music, the record collection I have, and my books. I feel it’s my responsibility to maintain them so they’re not destroyed. It’s important we do this for ourselves, as a people. To conserve our history, so we have a future. We can’t have a future unless we have a past.
I know a lot of black people who would rather have a Mercedes Benz to impress people than have an old utility vehicle and buy a great painting. Some folks think you gotta have an expensive car! [Laughs.] Well, what’s more important, history or your car? I think the history’s much more important than a damn car!
To see more paintings by Joe Overstreet, including other works from his Storyville Series, please go to the Hearing Eye Web site at www.oup.com/us/thehearingeye.
1. The Silver Screens exhibition included several works inspired by jazz musicians; unfortunately, I was unaware of this at the time of the interviews. (To see two of these paintings, Charlie’s Park and Monk’s Kitchen, please go to the Hearing Eye Web site.)
2. Corrine Jennings, Overstreet’s wife, is a co-founder and executive director of Kenkeleba House. She also writes about art and has edited many valuable exhibition catalogues.
3. Bellocq’s photographs appear in Al Rose, Storyville, New Orleans: Being an Authentic, Illustrated Account of the Notorious Red-Light District (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1974).
4. “The flat black forms at the upper right that overlap and form a somewhat irregular white diamond represented the artist’s spoof on ‘cubism and my breaking away from it.’ ” Ann Gibson, quoting Joe Overstreet, in her essay “Strange Fruit: Texture and Text in the Work of Joe Overstreet,” in Joe Over-street: Works from 1957 to 1993, ed. Peggy Lewis, exhibition catalogue (Trenton: New Jersey State Museum, 1996), 29.
5. I am grateful to Kunle Mwanga for sharing this story about Eric Dolphy, when he was still living with his parents in Los Angeles. “Eric was in his rehearsal room out back in the garage, practicing the flute. His parents were in the living room watching television. At some point, Mrs. Dolphy said to her husband, ‘Do you think Eric is all right? He’s been playing that same note for an hour or more.’ Well, they didn’t want to disturb him, so they carried on watching the television; but they couldn’t help but hear this same note, like a record stuck in a groove, over and over. The same note! Finally, they became so worried they went out to the garage to check on him. Mrs. Dolphy asked, ‘Eric, honey, is anything the matter? You keep playing the same note.’ Eric said, ‘Oh no, Momma, I’m fine. I’m just trying to get it right.’ ” Graham Lock, unpublished interview with Kunle Mwanga, Hoboken, 19 April 1998.
6. The lyrics to “Strange Fruit” were written by Lewis Allan.
7. Thomas McEvilley, “Joe Overstreet: Navigating the Seas of Tradition,” in Joe Overstreet: (Re)call & Response, ed. Thomas Piché Jr., exhibition catalogue (Syracuse, NY: Everson Museum of Art, 1996), 26.
8. There may be an echo here of Sun Ra’s poem “The Invented Memory,” in which he says that man is a blueprint, who “must build himself,” just as he builds a house. See Sun Ra, The Immeasurable Equation (Philadelphia: Sun Ra, 1980), 66.
9. You can see Seven Blues for Spring on the Hearing Eye Web site.
10. According to Thomas Piché Jr., “To the left, Marie Laveau is shown in red, her form recalling Fang sculptural traditions.” Thomas Piché Jr., “Joe Over-street: (Re)call & Response,” in his exhibition catalogue of the same name, 13.
11. Reed in turn has dedicated some poems to Overstreet. See, for example, “Badman of the Guest Professor” and “Poison Light,” in Ishmael Reed, New and Collected Poems (New York: Atheneum, 1988), 77–80, 100.
12. “The Fibonacci sequence, in which units are defined as the sum of the two preceding units (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, …) is the structural framework. This sequence determines the vertical proportions and movement of these works. Interest in Fibonacci’s system of arithmetical progressions followed an interest in musical interludes, for the structure of music, specifically jazz, influenced the compositional structure of Overstreet’s works since the midsixties.” Alison Weld, “Joe Overstreet: From the Figurative to the Abstract,” in Lewis, Joe Overstreet, exhibition catalogue, 16. Piché adds that the Fibonacci system can also be used to construct the golden rectangle, which in turn contains “whirling squares as well as logarithmic spirals” (Piché, “Joe Overstreet,”10). Overstreet has used this system to provide a geometric underpinning to his work since the early 1970s.
13. I am not sure what Joe Overstreet had in mind here. There seems to be no mention of the infirmary burning in the song lyrics, the Storyville exhibition catalogue, or Al Rose’s Storyville book. The last even asserts there was no such infirmary in New Orleans: “According to a common story, the church [St. James Methodist Church] offered first-aid services and modest hospital facilities and thus became the inspiration for the widely performed St. James Infirmary Blues. Unfortunately, this colorful and imaginative association is not true; indeed, the song has no connection with New Orleans whatever.” Rose, Storyville, 94.
14. For more on “Strange Fruit,” see David Margolick, Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Café Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights (Philadelphia: Running Press Books, 2000).
15. Joe Overstreet was unable to locate his copy of the LP but since he remembers first hearing the song in the 1940s, it seems likely that the original 1939 recording is the one with which he is most familiar. Holiday certainly sings there with a tight, controlled intensity that may perhaps, on some unconscious level, have found its way into the tension of Overstreet’s rope. This 1939 recording was recently reissued in Billie Holiday, The Complete Commodore Recordings (1939, 1944; reissue, Commodore-GRP CMD 24012, 1997).
16. It was a photograph of a lynching that also prompted Abel Meeropol (Lewis Allan) to write the poem that became “Strange Fruit.” See Margolick, Strange Fruit, 38–39.
17. Gibson, “Strange Fruit,” 27.
18. This painting, and the three others that make up Douglas’s Aspects of Negro Life series, can be seen at the Schomburg Center in Harlem.
19. “Our reality is that we have been violated through a passage of history that continues. With all the bitterness and anger, that position remains unchanged; thus, the paintings represent the duality of pain and beauty. Undermining the pain brings forth the beauty of the land and the people and the potential happiness of an ultimate resolution; so in this way, the paintings represent hope and optimism.” Joe Overstreet, “Facing the Door of No Return,” Joe Overstreet: Facing the Door of No Return: Recent Paintings, exhibition catalogue (New York: Kenkeleba Gallery, 1993), n.p.
20. Armstrong’s first and probably best-known version of “St. James Infirmary” was recorded with the Savoy Ballroom Five in 1928. It is available in numerous collections, including Louis Armstrong, Hot Fives and Sevens (1925–29; reissue, JSP 100, 1999).
21. Pianist Clarence Williams was best known as a songwriter, publisher, and bandleader. He wrote “Royal Garden Blues” and “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home,” among many other popular songs. His Blue Five group often featured outstanding instrumentalists, including (for a brief period together) both Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet, and he also recorded as an accompanist to Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters.
22. You can see Joe Overstreet’s painting Mahogany Hall on the Hearing Eye Web site.
23. Overstreet’s striking comparison brings to mind Olly Wilson’s essay “The Heterogenous Sound Ideal in African-American Music,” especially that part in which he contrasts the European preference for a smooth, homogenous timbral blend, as exemplified by the string quartet, with the African and African American preference for what he calls “contrast of color” in ensemble timbral textures. The example he gives is of a drum, a metal bell, and a flute, but the instrumentation of almost any small jazz group, from the Hot Five to the Art Ensemble of Chicago, could make the point equally well. See Olly Wilson, “The Heterogenous Sound Ideal in African-American Music,” in New Perspectives in Music: Essays in Honor of Eileen Southern, ed. Josephine Wright with Samuel A. Floyd Jr. (Warren, MI: Harmonie Park, 1992), 329. This timbral “roughness” is, of course, metaphorical, the result of an instrumental independence and difference that we might also liken to collage. But jazz can be seen as “rough” from a structural perspective too; because spaces are left for improvisation, it is not as smooth and “finished,” compositionally, as European classical music.
24. You can see The Arrival on the Hearing Eye Web site.
Joe Overstreet: Facing the Door of No Return: Recent Paintings. New York: Kenkeleba House, 1993.
Joe Overstreet: Storyville Series. New York: Kenkeleba House, 1989.
Lewis, Peggy, ed. Joe Overstreet: Works from 1957 to 1993. Trenton: New Jersey State Museum, 1996.
Piché, Thomas, Jr., ed. Joe Overstreet: (Re)call & Response. Syracuse, NY: Everson Museum of Art, 1996.
Armstrong, Louis. Hot Fives and Sevens. 1925–29. Reissue, JSP 100, 1999.
Holiday, Billie. The Complete Commodore Recordings. 1939, 1944. Reissue, Commodore-GRP CMD 24012, 1997.
Cannon, Steve. “Storyville (1897–1917).” In Joe Overstreet: Storyville Series. Exhibition catalogue. 27–34.
Gibson, Ann. “Strange Fruit: Texture and Text in the Work of Joe Overstreet.” In Lewis, Joe Overstreet. Exhibition catalogue. 27–40. An abridged version of this essay appears in International Review of African American Art 13.3 (1996): 24–31.
Jennings, C. L. “Joe Overstreet: Work-in-Progress.” Black American Literature Forum 19.1 (Spring 1985): 44–45.
Jennings, Corrine. “Storyville Series.” Introduction to Joe Overstreet: Storyville Series. Exhibition catalogue. 5.
Margolick, David. Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Café Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights. Philadelphia: Running Press, 2000.
McEvilley, Thomas. “Joe Overstreet: Navigating the Seas of Tradition.” In Piché, Joe Overstreet. Exhibition catalogue. 25–32.
Overstreet, Joe. “Facing the Door of No Return.” In Joe Overstreet: Facing the Door of No Return. Exhibition catalogue. N.p.
Piché, Thomas, Jr. “Joe Overstreet: (Re)call & Response.” In Piché, Joe Overstreet. Exhibition catalogue. 9–19.
Ra, Sun. The Immeasurable Equation. Philadelphia: Sun Ra, 1980.
Reed, Ishmael. New and Collected Poems. New York: Atheneum, 1988.
Rose, Al. Storyville, New Orleans: Being an Authentic, Illustrated Account of the Notorious Red-Light District. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1974.
Weld, Alison. “Joe Overstreet: From the Figurative to the Abstract.” In Lewis, Joe Overstreet. Exhibition catalogue. 9–22.
Wilson, Olly. “The Heterogenous Sound Ideal in African-American Music.” In New Perspectives in Music: Essays in Honor of Eileen Southern. Ed. Josephine Wright with Samuel A. Floyd Jr. Warren, MI: Harmonie Park, 1992. 327–38.
