Joe Overstreet (b. Conhatta, MS, 1933; d. New York, NY, 2019) was an artist and activist who pushed the boundaries of painting through decades of experiments in abstraction. He began his career in the Bay Area as a fixture of the Beat scene, living in the North Beach section of San Francisco. After moving to New York, he and his partner Corrine Jennings established Kenkeleba House, a gallery that has presented innumerable exhibitions of work by artists of color and women. As part of a generation of Black artists who fought for their visibility in an exclusionary art world, Overstreet was committed to creating paintings that stand alone on formal merit—independent of his identity—and taking an organizer’s role in providing exhibition opportunities to his peers. Overstreet’s work of the late 1950s to the mid-1960s assimilates his interests in Abstract Expressionism, Jazz, and African-American history. Many of his paintings are direct responses to the Civil Rights movement, racism, and the history of lynching.

Overstreet will be featured in the exhibition Edges of Ailey at the Whitney Museum of American Art, on view from September 25, 2024 through February 9, 2025. A major retrospective of Joe Overstreet’s work opens at the Menil Collection in Houston on January 24, 2025, and will travel to the Mississippi Museum of Art in August of 2025. 

Ellsworth Ausby (b. Portsmouth, VA, 1942; d. 2011) was an artist dedicated to reflecting a deeply rooted African aesthetic and cultural heritage. For one of his earliest exhibitions, he wrote “Blackness is the source of the colors, which is the Light.” Ausby’s paintings combine stylized biomorphic and figurative elements with geometric shapes and patterning. By the 1970s, Ausby was making unstretched canvases that were attached directly to the wall. These works utilize high keyed color and suggest sonic patterns and rhythms; the titles are based on 1970s Black colloquial vernacular.  Ausby will be featured in the exhibition Edges of Ailey at the Whitney Museum of American Art, on view from September 25, 2024 through February 9, 2025.

Walter C. Jackson (b. Holmes County, MS, 1940) is a sculptor whose work combines natural materials—such as wood, sisal and jute fibers—alongside industrial plastic and aluminum. Jackson describes his practice as a “unity of opposites,” containing spiritual considerations—with symbolic reference to both African cosmology and Christian iconography influenced by his Methodist upbringing—within the structure of urban geometries. Jackson fuses traditional totemic forms and contemporary aesthetics of light, movement, and refraction.

Pat Passlof (b. Brunswick, GA, 1928, d. New York, NY, 2011) was an abstract painter of the New York School whose tireless exploration of color and form gave her work a distinct voice. Having grown up in New York, in 1948 Passlof travelled to Asheville, North Carolina to study at the famed Black Mountain College, where she took classes with Willem de Kooning. Passlof’s early work built on her art education. She utilized biomorphic forms like those in the contemporary work of Arshile Gorky and de Kooning and was influenced by existentialist ideology which informed Abstract Expressionism. However, Passlof was always individualistic and her work was constantly varied in terms of touch, form, and palette. She was never content to repeat herself.

By the 1960s her palette began to lighten. She used repeated patterns and marks across the canvas to create dynamic rhythms. She drew upon experiences and memories, as noted by titles referring to people and places. However, she never believed in narrative in painting, even when, in later years, her work became peopled by centaurs, nymphs, and horses. Her work often suggested abstracted landscapes, like the later work of Claude Monet, although Passlof often worked in a vertical format. Passlof’s work was recently acquired by the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and Crystal Bridges Museum.

Costantino Nivola (1911–1988) was an Italian sculptor and muralist who grew up in Orani, a small village in Sardinia. As a young adolescent, Nivola worked locally as an apprentice stonemason. After fleeing fascist Italy in 1939, Nivola moved to New York and became a friend and disciple of the famed architect Le Corbusier. In 1950, he developed his singular technique of sandcasting, a method of casting plaster or concrete sculptures from molds made in sand. These works, which combine the texture of sand with the permanence of stone, represent a seamless integration of sculpture and architecture, and launched Nivola into the forefront of a heated international debate over the integration of the visual arts with architecture, the so-called “synthesis of the arts”. His work fuses ancient and contemporary mediums to explore the folklore and prehistoric art of Sardinia, focusing on themes of motherhood, nature, and community. The Museo Nivola, located in his birthplace, hosts the largest collection of his works.

FUTURA2000 (born Leonard Hilton McGurr; New York, NY, 1955) is a graffiti pioneer who began painting subways in the late 1970s. In 1980 he painted the iconic whole car titled “Break,” which was recognized for its abstraction rather than a focus on lettering. This painting established some of the enduring aesthetic motifs and approaches FUTURA2000 would explore over the decades that followed. The artist’s work reveals his interest in a futuristic aesthetic. He has long been fascinated by science fiction and the space age, and was an early adopter to sophisticated computer technology and video gaming. In his paintings we see certain motifs relating to these interests: the Pointman: an alien, robotic-like figure, and a form that has been called an atom-shape, but which is ultimately about perpetual movement. Perhaps most distinctive is the thin, refined line that FUTURA2000 achieves using spray paint. This is contrasted to the larger mists of color area, and to more gestural brush marks. Many of his paintings were made flat on the floor, and evoke the energy of moving around the perimeter of the painting, yet approaching the work with a deliberate elegance.  A major retrospective of FUTURA2000’s work, Futura2000: Breaking Out, is on view at the Bronx Museum of the Arts until March 30, 2025.