Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

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Organized religion was one of the many institutions that came under question in the 1960s. For many artists, the search for alternatives led to the exploration of expansive forms of spirituality, influenced by cultural roots, ancestral knowledge, and the occult. Many practitioners of historic Surrealism promoted esotericism and the magical sciences as tools for unlocking the subconscious mind and critiquing the dominant institutions—family, church, and state—of the period. The artists gathered here follow that line of thinking to various critical ends. Some, such as Jordan Belson and Ching Ho Cheng, sought spiritual knowledge by using meditation, psychedelic drugs, and divination as tools for elevating consciousness. Others, including Claes Oldenburg and Eduardo Carrillo, looked outward, questioning the dominance of religious institutions and reappropriating conventional iconography for new ends. Still others, such as Oscar Howe and Carlos Villa, evoked ritual practice in their work to assert claims to cultural identity and counter the destabilizing effects of colonization and Christianity upon Indigenous systems of belief.

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In Betye Saar's Ten Mojo Secrets, recognizable imagery, such as stars, moons, and suns, appears alongside abstracted photographs and scavenged bric-a-brac. The result is intentionally enigmatic: works from Saar's Mojo series contain "secret information," she has explained that "radiate[s] something that makes you uneasy." Combining found objects with symbols from astrology, palmistry, and tarot, the altar-like sculptures she created during this period evoke ideas of ritual, magic, and healing in both their accumulative forms and processes of making.

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Mojo Secrets

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Betye Saar, Ten Mojo Secrets, 1972

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