Sneak Preview of the Whitney Museum’s “Sixties Surreal” Art Show, Plus “Shifting Landscapes” Review

Sep 20

You know the oft-repeated line about the turbulent decade: “If you remember the Sixties you weren’t really there” famously coined by actor and comedian Charles Fleischer.

Well, you can soon see the not-so-swinging sixties through the prism of art at the Whitney Museum.

Taking in the installations, I was also inculcating the art’s messages to perhaps better take on the turbulent times we face now; not unlike how life in the Sixties was. Or so it seemed then… Defying normal? Check. Disorienting and Extraordinary? Check and check. So Surreal…

Nancy Graves: “Camels shouldn’t exist… They serve as a reminder that reality is strange & that even what is real may not be quite what it seems.”

Autumn in New York just got so much better. The Whitney Museum of American Art presents Sixties Surreal, a sweeping, ambitious, revisionist look at American art from 1958 to 1972 through the lens of the “surreal,” both inherited and reinvented. Opening on September 24, the exhibition 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.

Gotham’s weather on the day of the Press Preview (September 17th) was a soft drizzle: the perfect day to stroll over to the Whitney Museum for the Preview and spend the afternoon luxuriating in not only the soon-to-open Sixties Surreal exhibit but also scoot up to the Shifting Landscapes show.

I highly recommend that you catch both exhibits. They are thoughtfully curated so that I felt I not only learned something new and exciting but that I wasn’t overwhelmed. The shows are brimming with a variety of art forms: photography, paintings, sculpture, film, and more.

I enjoyed viewing some of the artists I knew; and discovering “new” ones to me.

An even more dynamic is to visit the High Line after viewing the garden art in the Landscape show!

Sixties Surreal

According to the Whitney, “Sixties Surreal reveals how artists across the country embraced and reinvented surreal tendencies to challenge conventions and mirror the strangeness of a time marked by radical political, social, and cultural change. 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,” said Scott Rothkopf, the Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney.

Rather than adhering to familiar movements of the 1960s like Pop Art, Conceptualism, or Minimalism, Sixties Surreal uncovers alternate histories and recontextualizes some of the decade’s best-known figures alongside those only recently rediscovered. The exhibition considers how artists turned to Surrealism, not as a European import, but as a way to navigate the strange, turbulent realities of American life. Featuring iconic works by Diane Arbus, Yayoi Kusama, Romare Bearden, Judy Chicago, Nancy Grossman, Christina Ramberg, David Hammons, Louise Bourgeois, Jasper Johns, Fritz Scholder, Peter Saul, Marisol, Robert Crumb, Faith Ringgold, H.C. Westermann, Jack Whitten, and many others, the exhibition brings new visibility to a generation of artists who challenged mainstream narratives in pursuit of radical freedom.

Curators Laura Phipps, Dan Nadel, and Elisabeth Sussman. “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.”

Spanning painting, sculpture, photography, film, and assemblage, twenty percent of the works on view in Sixties Surreal are drawn from the Whitney’s collection. The exhibition traces 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. Influenced by, and taking permission from, the ethos of historical Surrealism—dream logic, eroticism, irrationality—these artists channeled that spirit into new and localized forms, producing work that is deeply personal and politically pointed.

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, and still today—surreal.

Exhibition Overview – Sixties Surreal

Organized thematically rather than chronologically, Sixties Surreal invites you to move through immersive galleries that explore how artists across the U.S. responded to a decade in which the world itself felt increasingly surreal ~ not unlike today…

In an era marked by political unrest, radical liberation movements, shifting social norms, and an expanding media and technology landscape, the poet John Ashbery wrote, “We all ‘grew up Surreal’ without even being aware of it.”

By the late 1960s, the Surrealist movement, which began in 1920s Paris and inspired artists such as Salvador Dalí and René Magritte to explore dreams and the unconscious, had influenced everything from film and dance to design and advertising. Surrealism was pervasive throughout American popular culture, yet it was often seen as tasteless or passé, particularly by a New York-centric art world. However, for many artists working in the 1960s, Surrealism—or the more general idea of the “surreal”—became a liberating force. It offered a way to make art amidst profound cultural changes.

Sixties Surreal opens with an installation of three life-sized, lifelike camel sculptures by artist Nancy Graves. Initially exhibited in Graves’s solo exhibition at the Whitney’s Breuer Building uptown in 1969, the three camels in this gallery are not true taxidermy but are patchworked together out of natural and synthetic materials. They serve as a reminder for visitors as they enter the exhibition that reality is strange and that even what is real may not be quite what it seems.

While Pop Art was a predominant artistic movement of the 1960s, artists like Martha Rosler, Jim Nutt, and Lee Lozano were dismantling the consumerist promises of the American Dream in their work by blending domestic imagery with violent, sexual, and psychological associations. The works on display here can be understood in terms of their destabilizing effect on the viewer.

They question the reciprocal relationship between consumption and identity, a relationship that was increasingly fraught in the consumerist boom of the post-World War II era. In 1966, curator Gene Swenson organized The Other Tradition, an exhibition in Philadelphia that included many of the artists in this gallery alongside historic Surrealists like Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst.

The works presented in The Other Tradition and in this gallery highlight how surreal sensibilities infiltrated Pop’s sheen with undercurrents of dread and critique.

Abstraction through a surreal lens is explored and becomes embodied through the work of artists who forged new forms to reckon with the tactile and emotional reality of inhabiting a body. Some works on view in this section of the exhibition are erotic, while others are anxious, but they all evoke physicality through unorthodox materials.

Robert Crumb, Burned Out, Cover for East Village Other

Many artists in the 1960s presented everyday American life as being off-kilter, uncanny, or unexpected—in other words, surreal. This was particularly true of photographers who increasingly found that if they looked at the world from a certain angle, the disorientation of modern life became evident. Images and videos capturing the strangeness of postwar American life became even more ubiquitous as television sets transmitted this novel visual language directly into American homes.

Artists such as Lee Friedlander, Paul Thek, and Luis Jimenez were unnerved by television’s presence—the oddity of bringing this technology into a domestic space, an object that might confront you with images of Count Dracula one moment and the Vietnam War the next.

Violence and oppression confronted American households of the 1960s head-on as imagery of war, state violence, and systemic racism played on television for the first time. Artists such as Fritz Scholder, Nancy Spero, Peter Saul, and Ralph Arnold channel rage, grief, and resistance in works that echo this brutality and inequity.

Drawing from mass media and protest, their works use surreal exaggeration, satire, and fragmentation as forms of social critique. Here, the surreal is not escapist, but rather a tool of dissent.

Harold Stevenson, The New Adam, reimagines Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco, redirecting the hand of God inward because advertising had reduced the human form to a prop

The Surrealist tradition of collage and utilizing found objects is reclaimed in the 1960s by artists like Noah Purifoy, Bruce Conner, Melvin Edwards, and Ed Bereal, who employed assemblage to engage directly with contemporary political conditions. Whether responding to the Watts Rebellion, racism, war, or nuclear anxiety, these artists reconfigure cultural debris into poetic and provocative forms. The gallery emphasizes how assemblage became a language of protest and renewal during a period of social rupture.

Before the women’s liberation movement entered wider public consciousness in the early 1970s, women artists were creating an early feminist aesthetic and imagining new fields of possibility for themselves and their work. For historic Surrealists, the radical juxtapositions made possible by collage were appealing for their apparent capacity to communicate unconscious thoughts and desires. For the Proto feminists of the 1960s, like Martha Edelheit, Barbara Hammer, Luchita Hurtado, and Shigeko Kubota, collage techniques offered a way to highlight the myriad social, political, and psychological expectations for women. Although the presence of sexual content meant their work was often sensationalized as “erotic art,” such artists held an expansive set of concerns, from gender and sexuality to objectification and artifice.

Lynn Hershman Leeson, Giggling Machine Self Portrait as Blond tickles your fancy! You can’t help but laugh with the piece.

Visitors can purchase timed tickets for Sixties Surreal, opening September 24, 2025. More ticketing information is available on the Museum’s websit

Sixties Surreal is accompanied by a scholarly publication that complements the exhibition and aims to reevaluate American art of the 1960s by foregrounding the role of Surrealism during a period of social and political upheaval; shining a light on how American artists created a unique type of Surrealism, making works suffused with eroticism, dread, wonder, violence, and liberation. Copies are available for purchase online and in the Whitney Shop ($50.00).

Free Public Programs

A series of free in-person and virtual public programs will be offered in conjunction with Sixties Surreal. More information about these programs and how to register will be available on the Museum’s website as details are confirmed.

My moment of Surrealism! Looking down the hall to the Hudson River. Was that a person sitting there? Or?

One flight up is the Landscape show: Shifting Landscapes.

While not surreal, this exhibit pivots from what we’re used to seeing in our landscape gardens. Many of the creations are nevertheless pretty, however, the intent here is “a more expansive interpretation of the category, exploring how evolving political, ecological, and social issues motivate artists as they attempt to represent the world around them,” according to the museum.

Some of the pieces are locally sourced materials, ecofeminist approaches to land art, landscape photography; the impact of industrialization on the environment, and I think my favorite: where the artists created entirely new worlds where humans, animals, and the land become one.

The BugSim (Pheromone Spa) 2023 is a gorgeous video to look at and thought-provoking.

The Section Text reads:

The small insects and plants are preserved in a self-sustaining terrarium. Behind its moist glass surface, a busy colony of virtual ants marches as it is caught in a Sisyphean task of trying to build an ecosystem that is crumbling, while flora an fauna grow in every direction. Monitored by a mysterious creature peering in from the outside, the terrarium simulates natural cycles in this artificial environment….

Walk up to the High Line ~ just steps away ~ after seeing Shifting Landscapes for more garden art

ABOUT THE WHITNEY

The Whitney Museum of American Art, founded in 1930 by the artist and philanthropist Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), houses the foremost collection of American art from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Mrs. Whitney, an early and ardent supporter of modern American art, nurtured groundbreaking artists when audiences were still largely preoccupied with the Old Masters. From her vision arose the Whitney Museum of American Art, which has been championing the most innovative art of the United States for ninety years.

Whitney Museum Land Acknowledgment

The Whitney is located in Lenapehoking, the ancestral homeland of the Lenape (some of my ancestors…)

The name Manhattan comes from their word Mannahatta, meaning “island of many hills.” The Museum’s current site is close to land that was a Lenape fishing and planting site called Sapponckanikan (“tobacco field”). The Whitney acknowledges the displacement of this region’s original inhabitants and the Lenape diaspora that exists today.