America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the United States underwent a dramatic social and cultural upheaval. The sunny veneer and conformism of the immediate postwar years gave way to skepticism and calls for social justice, particularly on behalf of women, racial minorities, and others left behind. As in previous decades, such as the 1930s, artists bravely addressed pressing issues in their work as a form of protest and call for change. This chapter shows them tackling topics including voting rights in Danny Lyon’s photographs of Selma, Alabama; the exploitation of California farmworkers in Milton Glaser’s Don’t Eat Grapes; and the relationship between American patriarchal impulses and military action in Vietnam in May Stevens’s Big Daddy Paper Doll. We find images of the slain Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights activist Angela Davis, a ghoulish President Richard Nixon as well as the smiling portraits gathered by Howard Lester of the 242 soldiers killed during a single week in 1970 in the Vietnam War. The United States, as Bruce Nauman’s blistering 1971 palindrome suggests, was literally raw with war—on many fronts.

Other works in this chapter offer a more oblique take on a troubled time. The surreal bodies presented by Chicago artists Jim Nutt, Christina Ramberg, and Karl Wirsum suggest distortion, violence, and bondage, while Nam June Paik and Earl Reilback’s television sets each transmit images that are more eerie than entertaining. And On Kawara’s somber painting July 4, 1967, mutely marks the date on which it was made—Independence Day of a year when the world felt on fire.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.