Marking the close of Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight, join us for a two-day program that explores community building in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s–70s and its legacies today. Visiting artists and scholars will contribute to insightful discussions about the history of Kenkeleba House—a New York arts center co-founded by Joe Overstreet in 1974 to support African American artists—and Southern cultural producers will connect this history to Black-led arts organizations currently active in Mississippi. 

Day 1: Friday, January 23  

• 10:30 AM: Check-in (Museum Foyer) 
• 11 AM: Guided tour of Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight with MMA Associate Curator of Exhibitions Kaegan Sparks (The Donna and James Barksdale Galleries for Changing Exhibitions) 
• Boxed lunches will be provided for pre-registered attendees. 
• noon: Welcome and introduction by Kaegan Sparks (Trustmark Grand Hall) 
• 12:30–2 PM: Conversation with artist Sur Rodney (Sur) on their personal experiences working with Joe Overstreet and Kenkeleba House, moderated by Kaegan Sparks (Trustmark Grand Hall) 
• 2–2:30 PM: Break 
• 2:30–4:30 PM: Panel discussion on the history of Kenkeleba House with presentations by art historians Josie Roland Hodson, Abbe Schriber, and Alexandra M. Thomas, moderated by Maya Harakawa (Trustmark Grand Hall) 
• 4:30 PM: Reception (Trustmark Grand Hall) 

Day 2: Saturday, January 24  

• 10 AM: Check-in with coffee and pastries (Museum Foyer) 
• 11 AM–12:30 PM: Panel discussion on arts organizing in Mississipppi with presentations by cultural producers Gus Daniels-Washington (JXNOLOGY), Alexis Noble (Vibe Studio JXN), Christina McField (The WoodGrain Studio), and Carlton Turner (Sipp Culture), moderated by Wendy Shenefelt (Alternate ROOTS) 

Registration includes access to the final public close-looking tour of Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight at 2 PM. (The Donna and James Barksdale Galleries for Changing Exhibitions) 

Free and open to the public. 

About the participants

Gus Daniels-Washington (they/them) is an Artivism Educator and Social Justice Facilitator with over ten years of expertise in movement building, youth development, artivism (arts focused activism), community engagement, people assemblies, and education advocacy. Gus is the Founder and Executive Director of JXNOLOGY, a youth-led artivism and wellness collective that seeks to answer the question, “How does art impact change?” With proven leadership in conflict resolution, community assessment, and designing impactful events and projects addressing social issues, Gus works with young creatives and activists to build power and solutions in both the local and national context. Additionally, they are passionate about fostering inclusivity and empowering community through intergenerational programming. Through curricula development, Gus implements artist and youth-led agendas that innovate community development in Jackson, Mississippi. Through community-driven initiatives and artist coordination, Gus brings diverse voices together for impactful outcomes. Their commitment to justice, equity, and cultural advocacy shines through in every project undertaken.

Maya Harakawa (she/her) is Assistant Professor in the department of Art History at the University of Toronto. A specialist in the art of the African Diaspora in the United States, she studies histories of Black radicalism and their impact on Art History. Research for her current book project on Harlem in the 1960s has been supported by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora.

Josie Roland Hodson is a writer and PhD candidate in Black Studies and History of Art at YaleUniversity. Her work considers evolutions in experimental Black aesthetics—new avenues in performance art, public installation, and collective practice—in New York City during periods of austerity. Her scholarly writing and criticism have appeared in October,  Art in America, Grove Dictionary of Art, and Texte Zur Kunst, and she has contributed to catalogs for the Whitney Museum of American Art and Swiss Institute. Hodson also acts as the Collections Manager at the Mellon Foundation in New York City, where she stewards a collection of modern and contemporary artworks that reflect and affirm the Foundation’s longstanding commitment to the creation, study and enjoyment of the arts as a space of expression and rigorous inquiry.

Christina McField is a community advocate, contemporary artist, and cultural producer dedicated to empowering creatives through art and education. As founder of The WoodGrain Studio, LLC, she cultivates spaces where art and culture can thrive, fostering growth and collaboration within the creative community. McField was a recipient of the 2024–2025 Mississippi Art Commission Artist Fellowship and the 2021–2022 Community Impact Artist-in-Residence at Sipp Culture. At the Mississippi Museum of Art, she contributed to deepening the institution’s engagement with the community.

McField earned a MAAP from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA in sculpture from Mississippi State University. Her artistic practice explores themes of memory, history, and often-overlooked narratives of the rural South through photography and sculpture. Deeply committed to preserving Southern cultural heritage, McField advocates for fellow artists and believes in the transformative power of art to bridge communities, honor the past, and inspire future generations.

Alexis Noble is a multidisciplinary creative, Art Translator, curator, and cultural architect based in Jackson, Mississippi. She is the founder and executive director of Vibe Studio JXN, an independent art gallery and creative incubator redefining what contemporary Southern art looks and feels like. Known for her ability to translate emotions and community language into visual form, Alexis transforms galleries into storytelling environments that center authenticity, healing, and Southern Black creative expression.

Through her nonprofit, The Mash Up, Alexis has built one of Mississippi’s emerging creative ecosystems. Since 2022, she has designed open mics, youth programs, exhibitions, markets, residencies, and creative development experiences that meet artists where they are and push them forward. Her mission is rooted in legacy: to build a creative economy in Mississippi where artists don’t have to leave to level up.

Odili Donald Odita is an abstract painter born in Enugu, Nigeria and currently based in Philadelphia. He has exhibited nationally and internationally in art institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2025); Brooklyn Museum (2024); Baltimore Museum of Art (2019–2020); Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2019–2020); and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2015). Odita has been commissioned to paint large-scale wall installations at institutions including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond (2020); Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice, New York (2019); Yale University, New Haven (2015); United States Mission to the United Nations, New York (2011); and the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007). Odita is a Professor in Painting, Drawing & Sculpture at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University and is represented by the David Kordansky Gallery (New York and Los Angeles) and the Stevenson Gallery (Cape Town, South Africa).

Sur Rodney (Sur) is a Canadian-born writer, curator, and archivist who works collaboratively, drawing variously on performance, writing, and community archives. In 1972, at the age of 17, he discovered and became fascinated with the Lower East Side of Manhattan. A decade later, he produced broadcasts for Manhattan Cable TV and became renowned for his partnership with art dealer Gracie Mansion in the early 1980s. Sur served on the board of Visual AIDS from 1995–2010 and established the Visual AIDS Archive Project, a web-based resource for curators, educators, and researchers interested in utilizing art to fight AIDS. In the early 1990s Sur also worked at Kenkeleba House, where he assisted with realizing exhibitions and received a crash course on how racism functioned in the art world. Sur’s collected papers (ongoing) can be found in the Special Collections Library at Concordia University in Montreal. He lives and works in Lower Manhattan.

Abbe Schriber is Assistant Professor of Art History and African American Studies at University of South Carolina. Her research, writing, and teaching are invested in art’s role in liberation movements and ongoing struggles for racial justice; comparative transatlantic relations between the US South, Caribbean, and West Africa; public art; and Black-run spaces as focal points for reorienting art history. Her work has been supported by the Library of Congress, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among other institutions. Schriber’s writing has been published or is forthcoming in publications such as American Art, ARTS, and Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, and in exhibition catalogues for the Guggenheim, MoMA, and The Studio Museum in Harlem. Her current book project is a study of David Hammons in the 1970s and 1980s, exploring his use of African art and spiritualities to re-imagine pan-African solidarity.

Kaegan Sparks is Associate Curator of Exhibitions at the Mississippi Museum of Art, where she is site curator for Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight, organized by the Menil Collection (Fall 2025). In spring 2026 she will curate Coulter Fussell: The Proving Ground, the Mississippi-based artist’s first museum survey. Sparks is also an art historian, critic, and educator completing a PhD in art history at The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). She previously held curatorial and research fellowships at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Department of Media and Performance at the Museum of Modern Art, Dia Art Foundation, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art. She is also a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program. Her writing can be found in Artforum, Art in America, Movement Research Performance Journal, Bookforum, The Brooklyn Rail, and catalogues for the New Museum and Socrates Sculpture Park, among other publications.

Alexandra M. Thomas is an Assistant Professor of Art History and Affiliated Faculty in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Fordham University. Her teaching and research focus on African and African diasporic art histories with an emphasis on gender, sexuality, and migration. Currently, she is writing about the Black queer feminist errantry of the artist Mildred Thompson. Thomas’s art criticism can be found in Hyperallergic, Texte zur Kunst, Frieze, and various exhibition catalogs, and her curated exhibitions include Paul Camacho: El Ritmo y La Unidad at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Westport, CT (2023) and Homecoming: Domesticity and Kinship in Global African Art at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH (2023–2024). Since 2021, Aly has served as an assistant director for the Schomburg-Mellon Summer Humanities Institute in Harlem, New York, where she herself was a fellow in 2017.

Carlton Turner is an artist, agriculturalist, builder, researcher, and co-founder/co-director of the Mississippi Center for Cultural Production (Sipp Culture). He has more than 20 years of organizational development and management experience working in the arts and culture sector. He currently serves on the board of First People’s Fund, Grantmakers in the Arts, College Unbound, and the National Black Food and Justice Alliance. Carlton is a founding partner of the Intercultural Leadership Institute and the former Executive Director of Alternate ROOTS and a lead partner in the Southern Black Farmer Community Led Fund. He lives and works in Utica, MS where his family has been rooted for eight generations.