Sixties Surreal

Tickets available at tinyurl.com/2p9mt9za Jeremy Anderson, Benny Andrews, Kenneth Anger, Diane Arbus, Robert Arneson, Ralph Arnold, Romare Bearden, Jordan Belson, Ed Bereal, Wallace Berman, Judith Bernstein, Lee Bontecou, Louise Bourgeois, Joan Brown, Kay Brown, Roger Brown, T.C. Cannon, Eduardo Carrillo, Mel Casas, Vija Celmins, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Ching Ho Cheng, Judy Chicago, Bruce Conner, Jean Conner, Adger Cowans, Robert Crumb, Dale Brockman Davis, Jay DeFeo, Roy De Forest, Martha Edelheit, Melvin Edwards, Ed Emshwiller, Roy Fridge, Lee Friedlander, Rupert Garcia, Nancy Graves, Nancy Grossman, Barbara Hammer, David Hammons, Alex Hay, Wally Hedrick, Mike Henderson, Eva Hesse, Oscar Howe, Luchita Hurtado, Miyoko Ito, Suzanne Jackson, Ken Jacobs, Jae Jarrell, Jess, Luis Jimenez, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Barbara Jones-Hogu, Edward Kienholz, Kiki Kogelnik, Shigeko Kubota, Yayoi Kusama, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Linda Lomahaftewa, Lee Lozano, Marisol, David McManaway, Ron Miyashiro, Bruce Nauman, Gunvor Nelson, Senga Nengudi, Jim Nutt, Claes Oldenburg, John Outterbridge, Edward Owens, Kenneth Price, Noah Purifoy, Joseph Raffael, Christina Ramberg, Deborah Remington, Faith Ringgold, Suellen Rocca, James Rosenquist, Barbara Rossi, Edward Ruscha, Betye Saar, Niki de Saint Phalle, Lucas Samaras, Peter Saul, Raymond Saunders, Carolee Schneemann, Fritz Scholder, Kay Sekimachi, Joan Semmel, Jack Smith, Ming Smith, Robert Smithson, Nancy Spero, Anita Steckel, Harold Stevenson, Sturtevant, Paul Thek, Michael Cullen Todd, Carlos Villa, Shawn Walker, Timothy Washington, H.C. Westermann, Jack Whitten, Dorothy Wiley, William T. Wiley, Hannah Wilke, Franklin Williams, Karl Wirsum Sixties Surreal is an ambitious, scholarly reappraisal of American art from 1958 to 1972, encompassing the work of more than 100 artists. This revisionist survey looks beyond now canonical movements to focus instead on the era’s most fundamental, if underrecognized, aesthetic current—an efflorescence of psychosexual, fantastical, and revolutionary tendencies, undergirded by the imprint of historical Surrealism and its broad dissemination. Sixties Surreal recontextualizes some of the decade’s best-known figures alongside those only recently rediscovered. The exhibition gathers a range of works by artists including Diane Arbus, Lee Bontecou, Franklin Williams, Nancy Grossman, David Hammons, Linda Lomahaftewa, Mel Casas, Yayoi Kusama, Romare Bearden, and Louise Bourgeois, among others. In the 60s, many of these artists sought new strategies for connecting art back to a lived reality that seemed increasingly unreal due to rapid postwar transformation and the social, political, and technological upheavals of the later part of the decade. At the Whitney, Sixties Surreal will attend to the ways in which historical Surrealism of the earlier 20th Century laid the groundwork for a kind of vernacular surrealism in the 1960s—particularly in America, as cascading social and political changes affirmed that life, itself, is surreal. The way in which artists working across the country—from New York and Philadelphia, to Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area—beheld and reimagined this reality will be among the exhibition’s central concerns, while also mirroring the sociopolitical extremes in which artists of the present find themselves working. The exhibition's title, Sixties Surreal, states the show's straightforward historic parameters while suggesting a new take on that history. Sixties Surreal is organized by Dan Nadel, Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings and Prints, Whitney Museum of American Art; Laura Phipps, Associate Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art; Scott Rothkopf, Alice Pratt Brown Director, Whitney Museum of American Art; and Elisabeth Sussman, Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art, with Kelly Long, Senior Curatorial Assistant, and Rowan Diaz-Toth, Curatorial Project Assistant, Whitney Museum of American Art.