Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Combining painting with collage at a large scale, Raymond Saunders's imagery exists between abstraction and figuration. Here the artist transformed the central figure in Emmanual Leutze's monumental history painting Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851), surrounding the loosely rendered and ghostly likeness in bright red and pooling greys and browns. Saunders makes reference to the obscured soldiers by affixing a postcard depicting toy soldiers. Working in Northern California for many years, Saunders developed a collage-based painting mode that alluded to racial and social issues while maintaining a dreamy, elegiac atmosphere.

Franklin Williams used cast-off materials from a hospital in Oakland to create his painted, stitched, and crocheted sculptures. Somewhere between a pillow, a horseshoe crab, and an intestinal extraterrestrial, Williams's Untitled came from his lifelong engagement with craft and poetics. Williams grew up in Utah and was part of a family of prolific crafters, especially knitting, crocheting, and quilting—all of which Williams was well-versed in by the age of eight. In Oakland he developed a language that combined his skills and familial memories with the material-based work proliferating around him, an evolution that led to his inclusion in the 1967 exhibition Funk.

Made from redwood and pine found in the artist's Northern California backyard, Jeremy Anderson's Riverrun was inspired by his fascination with intestinal forms, medical school models, and the elongated figures in old comic books like Plastic Man (1941–56) and Powerhouse Pepper (1942–48). The tubular form at the center of this sculpture reflects Anderson's interest in combining the bodily and the geological, echoing his mystical interest in being one with nature. Anderson shares connections with many artists in this gallery: his work was included in the 1967 Funk exhibition, and his first New York exhibition was a two-person show with Louise Bourgeois in 1952.

The title of Barbara Chase-Riboud's bronze and wool sculpture suggests a self-portrait: the artist's figure is armored and draped in mourning black. This work relies on the artist's observations of textile, metalworking, and casting techniques she encountered in China, India, and Egypt. By combining hard and soft materials with references to her body in her sculptures from the 1960s and 1970s, Chase-Riboud created works that she described as "visually surrealistic." Curator Peter Selz—who organized the 1967 Funk exhibition—commissioned this sculpture, which was featured in Chase-Riboud's first one-person exhibition at the University of California, Berkeley, Art Museum.

While exploring a Marin County salvage shop in 1965, Bruce Nauman (then a graduate student at the University of California, Davis) caught sight of a wooden step. It was covered in worn green linoleum and resembled a footstool with its riser set at an unusually low angle. Nauman encouraged his graduate advisor, William T. Wiley, to have a look himself, and Wiley purchased the step for fifty cents. Using the found item as a prompt, the artists collaborated to give biographical life to this secondhand footstool through object-making and performance, including the Mold for a Modernized Slant Step. The deadpan and surreal gesture led to a 1966 group exhibition in San Francisco dedicated to the step.