Sixties Surreal: new exhibition offers an alternative view o...

We all know the familiar story of art in the 1960s – pop art, conceptualism and minimalism ruled the decade, dominated by the likes of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Sol LeWitt, and Jasper Johns. Bringing a welcome dose of counter-narrative to this calcified story, the Whitney’s bold new show Sixties Surreal, aims to introduce a new cohort of 60s artists who channeled the chaotic id of the decade, but only got a fraction of the acclaim.

“A generation of artists who were young in the 60s increasingly looked for artistic vocabularies that they could use to explore the weird and wild time they were living in,” said show curator Scott Rothkopf, who has longed to curate this exact show since his student days in the 1990s. “The 60s was a time of so much change – the fear of the atom bomb, multiple sexual revolutions, the civil rights movement, drug culture. These days felt to many young people like surreal days.”

Sixties Surreal is ambitious, collecting the work of a cool 111 artists, many of whom simply didn’t fit into any of the dominant narratives governing the 60s art world, and others who worked far from the established centers of tastemaking. It’s a loud, in-your-face experience with screaming colors, laugh-out-loud humor, bodies galore, and even three full-size camels made of wood, steel and burlap.

“When you walk off the elevator, you immediately find yourself in a room with these camels, which are very realistic,” said Rothkopf. “It becomes this surreal encounter.”

The show is also replete with marginalized demographics that, even in the freewheeling 60s, were sidelined against the largely white male headliners of the era. That includes a selection from Martha Edelheit’s swirling, psychedelic chorus of women’s bodies Flesh Wall and Joan Semmel’s impressionistic and abstractly erotic untitled collage.

“Women artists are such a huge protagonist in this story, because they were looking for new ways to explore the life that they were living and throw off dominant ideologies,” said Rothkopf. “That’s also why you’ll find lots of queer artists and artists of color in this show. They were looking for these liberatory impulses.”

The show collects two snaps by feminist photographer and director Barbara Hammer, as well as her first film Schizy, about which she has said: “[It] was about learning how to see double. What was the reality I saw? And what was expected of me? And how did other people see me. So, schizophrenic.” Shooting through bifocal lenses, Hammer offered a deeply personal sense of her fractured experience as a woman in the 60s, launching a wildly successful career in film, albeit one that did not receive due recognition until decades later.

“There are works of sexual exploration and discovery,” said Rothkopf. “You see women taking control of their depiction of their own bodies rather than being viewed by male artists. It offered them a possibility to imagine these spaces of liberation and self-determination.”

Sixties Surreal also prominently features Native American artists, including Linda Lomahaftewa, Oscar Howe and Fritz Scholder, whom the Whitney also gave star billing to on their summer show “Untitled” (America) for his almost-abstract Massacre at Wounded Knee II. Here Scholder offers Indian and Rhinoceros, while Lomahaftewa’s Untitled Woman’s Faces shows a stunning melange of texture, pattern, and color that are hewn together into an abstracted landscape grounded by a haunting central face staring out at us.

Howe drops a kaleidoscopic abstraction in jagged triangles of blues and reds that seem to swirl into a whirlpool, imparting a sense of movement that continually draws the eye around and around. She fused together Indigenous beliefs with modernist aesthetics to make a kind of art that was not easily categorizable.

“Indigenous artists like Lomahaftewa or Howe didn’t necessarily grow up in their training with the same traditional western American culture,” said Rothkopf. “Howe in particular had a great interest in painting Native traditions of spirituality and dance in these abstract and modernist forms. You see modes of cultural experience and spirituality expressed as an alternative to the dominant Christian white culture of the time.”

This show also goes off-script by attempting to engage audiences with their full bodies, and in surprising ways. The Whitney has incorporated elements such as museum walls covered in loud red and blue, dark lighting to evoke a somber mood, and tactile pieces like HC Westermann’s The Big Change, to deliver a body blow to viewers.

“We tried in the installation to create situations that heightened experience,” said Rothkopf. “As you move through the exhibition you’re on this journey of heightened senses. We hope people just feel it in their gut.”

Sixties Surreal has high ambitions to rewrite the story of the decade: instead of centering the canonized heart of the New York art world, it looks all across the United States to pull the margins into the middle of things.

“If you flip the 60s on its head, the thing that seemed to be a sideshow to this grand march of isms was actually the thing – the major thing,” said Rothkopf. “What artists were doing from the west coast to the east, to the south in Texas up to Chicago. So the major story that we’ve told ourselves can almost seem a little esoteric, relative to the many artists who were engaged in this kind of thinking.”

It’s also been an opportunity for many of these artists – still alive in their 80s and 90s – to finally get a piece of the limelight. Many of the makers have come to be a part of the show, marking an emotionally poignant full-circle moment across the sweep of the decades.

“This is maybe the thing I’m the most moved by,” said Rothkopf. “Creating space for all these wonderful voices to sing together in a new way and to find an audience. It was thrilling to see them light up in the galleries in front of works they made as young people.”

Sixties Surreal is on show at the Whitney in New York until 19 January 2026