Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

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Camels

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Camel VI–VIII, 1968–69

Three life-size camel sculptures stand on a wooden floor against a bright red wall with "Sixties Surreal" text.
Three life-size camel sculptures stand on a wooden floor against a bright red wall with "Sixties Surreal" text.

Installation view of Sixties Surreal (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 24, 2025–January 19, 2026). Nancy Graves, Camel VI, Camel VII and Camel VIII, 1968–69. Artwork © 2025 Nancy Graves Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photograph by Ron Amstutz, digital image © Whitney Museum of American Art

“Camels shouldn’t exist,” the artist Nancy Graves once remarked. “They have flesh on their hooves, four stomachs, and a dislocated jaw. Yet, with all of the illogical form, the camel still functions.” Graves first encountered taxidermic camels at the natural history museum where her father worked, and she later traveled to North Africa to study and film its dromedary herds. Initially exhibited in Graves’s 1969 solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s former uptown building, the three camels in this gallery are not true taxidermy but a patchwork of natural and synthetic materials. They serve as a reminder that reality is strange and that even what is real may not be quite what it seems.

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Frank WANG Yefeng, The Levitating Perils #2

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