This beautiful volume contains 260 pages, over 200 full-color images of Cleve’s work and a brief history of his life.
$60.00
Be among the first to own Cleve Overton – His Life and Art, which will be released this September. This beautiful volume contains 260 pages, over 200 full-color images of Cleve’s work and a brief history of his life. Cleve was an artist, author, social activist and educator. His work includes woodcut prints, ceramics and mixed media collages. A skilled welder, he brought the same creativity to functional pieces as he did to art.
Price $60.
Prepublication Price $45 (through September 30)
Shipping $10
Reserve your copy before September 30 to receive the discount and a hand signed book with a Patron of the Arts First Edition embossed gold seal.
Cleve Overton: His Life and Art
Compiled and written by Jude Andreasen
clevesart.com, HC, Art, $60., 260 pages, 200+ full-color images
ISBN 979-8-9958428-0-4
There are artists who create objects, and there are artists who create historical memory. Cleve Overton belonged firmly to the latter tradition. Cleve Overton: His Life and Art, lovingly compiled by Jude Andreasen, is far more than a beautifully illustrated retrospective of an accomplished visual artist. It is an act of cultural recovery, restoring to public consciousness a Black artist whose life’s work challenged historical erasure, racial injustice, and the boundaries that too often separate art from activism.
The volume arrives at a moment when museums, archives, and scholars are reexamining whose stories have been preserved—and whose have been overlooked. In that context, this book assumes significance beyond biography. It asks readers to reconsider the canon itself, arguing persuasively that Cleve Overton deserves recognition not simply as an accomplished mixed-media artist, but as one of the many independent Black cultural workers whose influence has remained largely outside institutional narratives.
From the opening pages, Andreasen establishes that Overton’s life cannot be understood apart from the America in which he lived. Growing up as one of the few Black children in a predominantly White Staten Island neighborhood, serving in a segregated Army, confronting discrimination in employment, and later organizing against inequitable housing and labor practices, Overton transformed lived experience into artistic purpose. His work did not emerge from abstraction. It emerged from witness.
That witness took many forms.
Overton was a printmaker whose woodcuts honored figures such as Billie Holiday and Malcolm X. He was a potter who dug his own clay from Staten Island soil and founded The Potter’s Wheel, a community arts cooperative where artistic instruction became an instrument of empowerment. He was a master fabricator whose welding skills sustained his livelihood while simultaneously expanding his sculptural vocabulary. Later, he became an innovative mixed-media artist, transforming discarded wood, metal, found objects, and recycled materials into richly layered visual essays on history, memory, and social justice.
Golden Mirage – 40” x 8”
Wood collage – 1998
What distinguishes this book from many artist monographs is its insistence that every medium represented another language in Overton’s lifelong conversation about freedom. Whether carving woodcuts, building monumental pottery, photographing African architecture, or assembling politically charged collages, Overton continually asked a single question: Who has the power to shape history, and whose history has been omitted?
Perhaps nowhere is that question more powerfully illustrated than in Andreasen’s discussion of Overton’s decades-long campaign against the racist iconography embedded within Staten Island Borough Hall’s WPA murals. Rather than calling for destruction, Overton advocated historical accountability, arguing that public art carries a civic responsibility to acknowledge both its achievements and its prejudices. That struggle reveals an artist deeply committed to contextualization rather than censorship—a distinction increasingly relevant in today’s public conversations about monuments, museums, and collective memory.
Equally compelling are the chapters chronicling Overton’s years in Niger, Senegal, and Zaire. His encounters with African artists, artisans, landscapes, and material culture profoundly reshaped his visual language without ever descending into romanticism or appropriation. Instead, Andreasen presents an artist engaged in genuine dialogue with Africa—learning languages, documenting local traditions, exhibiting alongside African artists, and allowing those experiences to deepen his understanding of the African diaspora. The resulting mixed-media works possess both formal elegance and historical resonance, affirming Africa not as metaphor but as lived reality.
The greatest achievement of His Life and Art, however, lies in revealing Overton’s extraordinary intellectual range. He was simultaneously artist, educator, archivist, entrepreneur, builder, environmentalist, traveler, and historian. He founded community institutions, documented disappearing Black communities, championed preservation projects, taught ceramics, wrote books, organized exhibitions, and mentored younger artists with remarkable generosity. His creative practice rejected specialization in favor of an expansive philosophy in which making, teaching, building, and protesting formed a single continuum of civic and artistic engagement.
Jude Andreasen
Cleve Overton
Andreasen deserves enormous credit for resisting the temptation to overinterpret the artwork. Her editorial approach allows the photographs, chronology, and documentary record to speak with clarity and confidence. The result is a volume that functions simultaneously as biography, exhibition catalog, visual archive, and historical record. The careful sequencing of images across six decades enables readers to witness an artist whose formal experimentation never eclipsed his moral vision.
Andreasen’s admiration is evident throughout, and understandably so. Readers seeking sustained engagement with Overton’s place alongside artists such as Noah Purifoy, Betye Saar, Melvin Edwards, or John Outterbridge may wish for greater critical comparison. Yet this omission does little to diminish the book’s lasting value. Indeed, it may encourage precisely the scholarship this publication makes possible.
Cleve Overton: His Life and Art offers something increasingly essential: evidence that Black cultural history has always been sustained not only by celebrated names but also by independent visionaries working beyond the spotlight. Overton reminds us that artistic greatness is not measured solely by museum retrospectives or auction records. It is measured by the ability to change how people see their world.
Billie,12” x 18”
Woodcut on rice paper,1958
(College of Staten Island Collection)
Bowl Green 2b,
Overton-Fishbach Collection,1975
Stoneware pottery – 4½” x 5½”
