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A new exhibit coming to The Whitney Museum of American Art reads like a who's who of revolutionary artists working in the 1960s. The show, titled Sixties Surreal, features Diane Arbus, Yayoi Kusama, Andy Warhol, Romare Bearden, Jasper Johns, Nancy Grossman, David Hammons, Louise Bourgeois and Faith Ringgold, just to name a few.
What all of these artists have in common is their way of contributing to "a sweeping, ambitious, revisionist look at American art from 1958 to 1972 through the lens of the 'surreal,'" the museum says. In all, the sprawling show features the work of 111 artists who embraced the psychosexual, fantastical and revolutionary energy of an era shaped by civil unrest, cultural upheaval and boundless experimentation. See it and step back from September 24–January 19.
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Expect to feel the trippy energy from the very first piece in the show: An installation of three life-sized, lifelike camel sculptures by artist Nancy Graves. From there, the exhibit continues thematically, enabling visitors to explore to a decade in which the world itself felt increasingly surreal.
The show features painting, sculpture, photography, film and assemblage, tracing how artists working in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and New York grappled with identity, sexuality, race and power in ways often overlooked in canonical art histories. Though the women's liberation movement didn't enter wider public consciousness until the early 1970s, Sixties Surreal showcases how women artists were creating an early feminist aesthetic and imagining new fields of possibility for themselves and their work.
From the experimental films of Jordan Belson to the biomorphic sculptures of Barbara Chase-Riboud and the visionary imagery of Jay DeFeo, the show unites diverse voices under a shared impulse to depict the world as it felt at the time—surreal. Artists turned to Surrealism as a way to navigate the strange, turbulent realities of American life—something that feels quite on-the-nose today.
This exhibition helps to reshape how we understand the art and spirit of the 1960s, as well as our own roiling moment.
Some art trends from the Sixties are familiar, like Pop Art, Conceptualism and Minimalism. But instead of focusing on these more well-known movements, this exhibition uncovers alternate histories and recontextualizes some of the decade's best-known figures alongside those only recently rediscovered, per a museum press release.
"By bringing their visionary contributions into fuller view, this exhibition helps to reshape how we understand the art and spirit of the 1960s, as well as our own roiling moment," the museum's director Scott Rothkopf said in a press release.
Over nearly three decades of research, The Whitney team discovered a massive new network of art in the '60s, one that highlights artists and ideas "that have too often been left out of institutional histories," curators Laura Phipps, Dan Nadel, and Elisabeth Sussman said in a news release. "We hope that this view of the long sixties will offer a vibrant and capacious new version of the decade and leave visitors with ideas for how to build a new future."