“Joe Overstreeet: Taking Flight” at the Menil Collection shines a long-overdue spotlight on an astonishingly innovative artist who explored the Black experience in the United States through abstraction. Thoughtfully curated by Natalie Dupêcher, the show also features pieces from three of the artist’s major series. Visually, the works’ brilliant colors and inventive forms are breathtaking, but a closer look reveals deeper messages about the complicated political world in which the artist lived. Born in rural Conehatta, Mississippi, in 1933, Overstreet and his family left the South in the early 1940s and eventually settled in Berkeley, California. The artist joined the US Merchant Marine before establishing his first studio in San Francisco, where Beat poetry, jazz music, and the artist Sargent Johnson were formative influences. A move to the Upper West Side of New York City in 1958 introduced him to an older generation of painters like Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, and in 1960, Ov...