The Menil Collection The Menil Collection

On April 5, 1968, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, the American artist Joe Overstreet began work on the painting that would become Justice, Faith, Hope, and Peace (fig. 1). Bearing a title that evokes the idealism of the Civil Rights movement, the work is a panoply of vivid color and hard-edge geometric designs. Concentric stripes, stylized spearheads, and zigzagging lines ripple across its surface, in a vibrant spread that spans fifteen feet across by seven feet high. The work consists of four canvases, which Overstreet fashioned from hand-built stretchers and painted freehand. When installed, the four panels nestle tightly together, visually interlocking in a synergy of color and line. Mirrored across the construction’s central axis, their frames establish a bilateral symmetry, while their painted forms jump between canvases, extending to the outer reaches of the artwork. The overall effect is one of cohesion and unity, as if the panels belong together and should be viewed as one.

Yet, as a cache of correspondence in the Menil Archives reveals, the four-panel painting can be partitioned and split apart, its constituent units treated as discrete artworks. This is precisely what happened in 1970, when Overstreet separated the painting’s internal panels from their outer companions. He sent the inner-half portion to the studio of New York–based artist Larry Rivers, who was then curating a show in Houston called Some American History. Financed by John and Dominique de Menil and presented at Rice University’s Institute for the Arts in 1971, the exhibition mined the histories and persistent legacies of racial oppression in America, from the first documented arrival of enslaved persons to present day. Rivers had invited Overstreet and five other artists of color to participate, and asked them, with the de Menils’ underwriting, to supply two or three works related to the “theme of race” and “the black experience” in the United States.⁽¹⁾ Overstreet created a three-dimensional painting titled The New Jemima, reprising an earlier version of the work as an outsized construction shaped like a pancake box. He then took Justice, Faith, Hope, and Peace's two inner panels, effectively recasting them as individual paintings, and consigned all three into Rivers’s care.

Rivers relayed the news of Overstreet’s contributions to John de Menil, who, in turn, wrote Overstreet in February 1970. The first of many epistolary exchanges between Overstreet and the de Menils, the letter reads: “Larry Rivers told us 3 or 4 days ago that you’ll contribute a piece showing Aunt Jamima [sic] holding a sub-machine gun to the History of the Afro-Americans project. He also told us that you would lend to the exhibition a piece inspired by African shields. That’s good news indeed.”⁽²⁾ In almost all subsequent correspondence and preparatory materials, the panels are elliptically referenced in this way, as paintings “inspired by African shields.” Only once are they explicitly named. In October 1970, in a letter to John de Menil, Overstreet calls them “the two paintings, Faith and Hope,” citing the second and third terms of Justice, Faith, Hope, and Peace (fig. 2).⁽³⁾

Overstreet’s coupling of the words “faith” and “hope” is telling. Its effect, intentional or not, was to divide the painting’s titular terms, like the panels to which they correspond, into two complementary pairs. The first set, “justice” and “peace,” pays subtle homage to Martin Luther King Jr., invoking the slain Civil Rights leader’s pacifist rhetoric. Yoked together, they also recall a specific statement made by King in 1964, in which he inextricably linked the two terms: “I don’t think there can be justice without peace, and I don’t think there can be peace without justice.”⁽⁴⁾ In the other pair, “faith” and “hope” are bound not only to each other but also to the site from which they were borrowed—that is, a public monument Overstreet visited the day he first began the painting.

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King’s assassination on April 4, 1968, sparked protests in several American cities, including New York, where Overstreet had lived since the late 1950s. Amid the outcry and uproar, Overstreet emerged from his loft on the Bowery and walked several blocks north to Tompkins Square Park on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He wandered through the park and settled on a bench in the northwest corner. “I sat and I thought about him. I thought about Martin Luther King,” Overstreet later recalled. As he contemplated the Civil Rights leader’s death, his eyes rested on a freestanding stone pavilion nearby, a neoclassical anomaly in his concrete cityscape. Called the Temperance Fountain, it serves as a monument to the antebellum temperance movement. As a commemorative marker of American temperance, it honors those progressive activists—largely African American and minority communities—who propelled the reformist causes of temperance, abolition, and suffrage before the Civil War. It memorializes their efforts with its inscription, “temperance,” emblazoned on the fountain’s canopy alongside the words “charity,” “faith,” and “hope.”

Something drew Overstreet to these words as he sat before the Temperance Fountain that morning, the city aswirl around him. He could have found in them a spirit of idealism, echoing the interracial optimism of King and the Civil Rights movement. To him, the scriptural triad of “faith,” “hope,” and “charity,” drawn from St. Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians, may have recalled the pulpit style of King’s speeches, in which the minister-turned-Civil Rights leader blended biblical allusions with calls for social betterment. Whatever the case, something impelled Overstreet to carry the words “faith” and “hope” back with him to his Bowery studio. Though disembodied from their source, they remained fundamentally bound to the Temperance Fountain and, by extension, the memory of American temperance. Overstreet married these rhetorical fragments to “justice” and “peace,” familiar refrains from the Civil Rights movement, and ascribed the coupled terms to his shaped canvas construction. In so doing, whether wittingly or not, he created a powerful triumvirate of word, image, and history, locating his work within a broader continuum of African American activism. Linked together by their title, and the histories that inhere in this sequence of words, the four panels of Justice, Faith, Hope, and Peace become not just visually but also symbolically connected. When assembled as one, the painting emits a chorus of civil rights activism and African American resistance, extending back more than a century and, as long as the work is kept together, reverberating into the future.

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Overstreet’s painting remained in its unified form for the first two years, then, in 1970 the artist divided the painting, disrupting the tightly fitted mosaic of African American histories. That June, Faith and Hope were shipped from New York to Texas, along with the other sixty-some works slated for Some American History. The panels were photographed upon arrival in Houston, their vibrating geometries positioned against a plain white background (figs. 3–4). The resulting transparencies are filed in the Menil Archives, bundled with slides of the show’s installation at the Rice Museum. In those gallery views, however, Overstreet’s panels are conspicuously absent (fig. 5). So, too, are they absent from the show’s catalogue. For unknown reasons, Faith and Hope were not included in Some American History. The de Menils acquired Overstreet’s The New Jemima and, soon thereafter, two of his suspended, abstract Flight Patterns and an untitled watercolor. But the separated inner panels were never formally accessioned into the de Menils’ collection. Nor were they exhibited in the solo exhibition of Overstreet’s work, held in 1972 at two venues—Rice University and the Black Arts Center at the De Luxe Theatre in Houston’s Fifth Ward (fig. 6). Despite this, Faith and Hope stayed in Houston under the Menil Foundation’s auspices for nearly a decade, until Overstreet wrote Dominique de Menil (John had died in 1973) in search of his painting’s missing half.

Overstreet’s letter reached de Menil in June 1979. In the preceding months, a picture researcher had written the artist, seeking to reproduce Justice, Faith, Hope, and Peace in a forthcoming textbook. With only the outer panels in New York, Overstreet turned to de Menil for the remaining pair. “Dear Mrs. De Menil,” he wrote, “It’s been years since we’ve talked.” Indeed, in the intervening six years, Overstreet had funneled his energies into Kenkeleba House, the nonprofit arts organization and gallery he cofounded in 1974. “I haven’t shown much since my Houston exhibit, and I have a lot of new work that I would like very much for you to see,” he continued. Recounting to de Menil how the panels came to Houston by way of Larry Rivers, he relayed the researcher’s request, followed by his own: “If we do find that you have the two panels, I would like to interest you in the other two, because I think the paintings should be kept together.” ⁽⁵⁾

A search ensued through the de Menils’ holdings. With no record of their exhibition or accession, the panels initially eluded the Menil Foundation staff, but they ultimately surfaced in their storage holdings in November 1979. “I am relieved to know that my paintings have been located and that they are safe,” Overstreet responded. “I have regretted splitting the painting,” he admitted, since 1970, “when Larry Rivers wanted to use only Faith and Hope in the Some American History exhibit.” In the letter’s closing, he once again asked de Menil to acquire the painting’s outer half. “If you are interested in purchasing the other two panels, I would part with Justice and Peace,” he wrote, stating that he “would be gratified to know that the painting is reunited as well as being cared for.”⁽⁶⁾

De Menil preferred instead to augment their existing collection of Flight Patterns: “I am quite fond of the two pieces I bought that were part of the exhibition at the Rice Museum in 1972,” she told the artist. In what followed, she advanced a proposition that would lead to a third Flight Pattern purchase, and their fifth and final acquisition of Overstreet’s work: “I would like to exchange the […] central part of [Justice, Faith, Hope, and Peace] for another construction like the ones I bought from the Rice show. […] Thus the idea is to make a trade with you which would enable you then to have [Justice, Faith, Hope, and Peace] complete.”⁽⁷⁾

Though Overstreet was drawn to the idea, it would be another two years before he could visit California, where his Flight Patterns were stored. From the group of unstretched canvases, he picked Man and Woman Came from a Reed, what he dubbed “a very strong statement in that phase of my painting” (fig. 7).⁽⁸⁾ Upon seeing Man and Woman Came from a Reed, de Menil agreed to purchase the painting in exchange for the two inner panels and a sum of money. Overstreet used the funds to embark on his first trip to Europe, where he “visit[ed] the Masters” at the Louvre, National Gallery, and Prado Museum and reveled in the Moorish architecture of Spain’s Andalusia. ⁽⁹⁾

Faith and Hope were delivered to Overstreet in October 1983, completing a thirteen-year round trip between New York and Houston. They arrived at his building on East 2nd Street, a mere five-minute walk from the Temperance Fountain, the site where he began conceptualizing the work over fifteen years before. Returned to the artist after more than a decade, Faith and Hope could once again adjoin Justice and Peace, their angular shapes sitting together in a state of brilliant equipoise. With the panels reunited, so, too, were the histories encoded therein. The power that rests between image, word, and history was restored and redoubled.

In one of the many letters traded between Overstreet and Dominique de Menil across this years-long exchange, Overstreet expressed his wish for a second solo exhibition to follow his one-man show in 1972: “I’d like very much to show my work in Houston again some day,” he wrote.⁽¹⁰⁾ With Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight, the Menil Collection fulfills two of Overstreet’s professed wishes. It grants the artist another solo show in Houston, the first museum exhibition of his work in three decades. And it brings Justice, Faith, Hope, and Peace to the Menil in its fully unified form, the four panels “reunited” and “kept together,” as Overstreet had hoped.