Sixties Surreal at The Whitney Museum of American Art gathers works by 111 artists active between 1958 and 1972, including Diane Arbus, Yayoi Kusama, Andy Warhol, and Louise Bourgeois. The exhibition spans painting, sculpture, photography, film and assemblage to reveal surreal, psychosexual, fantastical, and revolutionary impulses shaped by civil unrest and cultural upheaval. The presentation foregrounds regional practices from Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and New York and highlights early feminist aesthetics by women artists. Notable elements include life-sized camel sculptures by Nancy Graves and experimental films, offering thematic journeys through a decade of radical artistic experimentation.
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.
See it and step back from September 24-January 19. RECOMMENDED: All the free museums days in NYC you should know about 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.
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