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.

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Two people holding signs that say "Register now for freedom now" and "Register to vote"

The son of European émigrés, self-taught photographer Danny Lyon traveled south to join the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Selma, Alabama, in 1962. Working with the civil rights organization for two years, he became its first staff photographer and documented its activities, including sit-ins and marches, as they campaigned across the South for racial equality. In images that combine the unflinching realism of street photographers such as Robert Frank with the intertwining of reporter and participant that marked New Journalism, Lyon helped publicize the group’s efforts and, in the process, produced a visual record of a crucial period in the history of the civil rights movement.

Two SNCC Workers, Selma (which was published in a 1964 documentary book about the movement) pictures a pair of SNCC workers encouraging voter registration, which had been made difficult for African Americans in the South by obstacles such as literacy tests and administrative delays. The imperatives of the men’s signs, the visual rhythm created by their matching stances, and the striking tonal contrasts in the image make for a dramatic composition. Indeed, the moment Lyon captured was a tense one: soon after this shot was taken, the workers were arrested—an incident that Lyon also caught on camera.

Adapted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015), p. 241. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

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America Is Hard to See

Raw War

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DANNY LYON (B. 1942), TWO SNCC WORKERS, SELMA, 1963

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On the Hour

America Is Hard to See

Raw War

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DANNY LYON (B. 1942), TWO SNCC WORKERS, SELMA, 1963

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

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in the Whitney's collection