Houston’s beloved Menil Collection is about to fill its galleries with color in motion. ‘Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight,’ opening Friday, November 13, 2026 and running through April 19, 2027, celebrates one of the most inventive American painters of the last sixty years — an artist who quite literally cut his canvases loose from the wall.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Overstreet began a radical experiment. Instead of stretching his paintings flat, he suspended them from ropes and cables, letting the canvas billow, fold and soar through the gallery like a sail or a kite. Works such as ‘Just B’ (1968) turned painting into sculpture and made the viewer’s own movement part of the art. The Menil was made for moments like this: its light-filled, intimate galleries in the leafy Montrose art district reward anyone who slows down and looks closely.
The exhibition is organized by Rebecca Rabinow, Chief Curator of the Menil Collection, with Kelly Montana, Associate Curator for the Menil Drawing Institute. It continues a season that also brings ‘Robert Pruitt: Infinite’ and the permanent-collection installation ‘VERTEX’ to the museum’s galleries this fall.
Best of all, the Menil is always free, and so is this show. Plan a full art day around it: wander from the main building to the Cy Twombly Gallery, pause at the Rothko Chapel a short stroll away, and finish with a picnic on the museum’s broad green lawns under the live oaks. It is one of the happiest art outings in Houston — world-class, welcoming, and easy on the wallet.
Photo: Francisco Anzola, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
