The San Francisco International Airport (SFO) announced the reopening of a passenger walkway to Harvey Milk Terminal 1 that celebrates the work of artist Joe Overstreet (1933-2019). Tunnel A/B, which connects the terminal and Domestic/Hourly Garage, reopens on Tuesday, November 3, 2020, and features a restored art installation created by Overstreet in the mid-1980s.
“Artwork has always played an important role in the SFO experience, and we are proud to bring renewed attention to the work of Joe Overstreet,” said Airport Director Ivar C. Satero. “I am excited for travelers around the world to discover and learn more about Joe’s work, his life, and his legacy.”
Renovated as part of the $2.4B Harvey Milk Terminal 1 project, Tunnel A/B has been transformed to place visual emphasis on the work of Overstreet, with layout and lighting that evokes the feel of an art gallery. The project team also refreshed and restored the curved steel panels that comprise the installation, addressing rusting and oxidation that occurred over the past three decades. A new plaque at the end of the tunnel provides information on both the artwork and its creator, Joe Overstreet. On October 29, 2020, Airport Director Ivar C. Satero held a private preview of the renovated walkway with members of the Overstreet family.
Overstreet’s steel panel reliefs, which appear in both Tunnels A/B and C of Harvey Milk Terminal 1, refer to the westward migration through the Sierra Nevada mountain range and the related discovery and quest for gold. The installation invokes ideas of flight, motion, direction, determination and advancement. The panels associate and merge the histories of Asian, African and European Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California, while reflecting sacred visual concepts of Native American culture. The seventy-five, fifteen-foot-wide curved steel panels are installed between columns, each panel a steel-on-steel relief. Abstract human figures designed for their poetic and rhythmic quality have been cut out and layered on the steel plates to create an illusion of depth, as the weathering corten steel translates the richness and subtlety of the design and its earth-like metaphor.
Joe Wesley Overstreet was born in Conehatta, Mississippi, on June 20, 1933. In 1939, his family began the first of several moves around the country before settling in Berkeley, California, in 1947. Upon graduating from Oakland Technical High School in 1951, Overstreet worked part-time in the Merchant Marine while studying art at Contra Costa College in Richmond, California; California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco; and California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, where he was instructed by artist Raymond Howell (1927–2002). After moving to San Francisco’s bohemian North Beach neighborhood, Overstreet was mentored by sculptor and painter Sargent Johnson (1888–1967), who maintained a nearby studio. Overstreet was a fixture of the city’s Beatnik scene and exhibited in galleries and jazz clubs throughout the Bay Area. In 1955, Overstreet moved to Los Angeles and became a key figure in a vital community of Black artists while working as an animator at Walt Disney Studios.
In 1958, Overstreet moved to New York City and established a painting studio while earning a living as a department store window designer. Overstreet was befriended by artist Hale Woodruff (1900–80) and joined an informal salon of other Abstract Expressionists that included Willem de Kooning (1904–97) and Franz Kline (1910–62). He found inspiration in the work of Romare Bearden (1911–88) and Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000), two leading African American artists, and Overstreet’s paintings reflected his confident expression in abstraction and figuration, the personal and the political.
Active in the Civil Rights movement, Overstreet became the art director at Harlem’s Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School (BARTS) in 1965 and advocated for the rights of African American artists. In 1974, he co-founded the Kenkeleba House Gallery and Sculpture Garden in Manhattan’s Lower East Side to showcase artists of color who were largely ignored by the arts establishment. In a painting career spanning six decades, Overstreet’s work ranged from figurative to geometric abstraction and included sculptural paintings on shaped canvases. His artwork has been exhibited in museums around the world and is held in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum; Newark Museum of Art; Oakland Museum of California; the UC Berkeley Art Museum; and the Menil Foundation Collection in Houston.
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