Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Shawn Walker's documentary-style photographs encapsulate a sense of latent strangeness in otherwise ordinary circumstances. As a founding member of the activist filmmaking collective Newsreel (founded 1967), Walker spent the 1960s focused on the cultural, social, and political change happening in the world and, importantly, right around him in Harlem. Along with the work of Ming Smith and Adger Cowans, his photographs also foreground the artists of the Kamoinge Workshop (founded 1963)—a collective of Black artists who primarily photographed Black communities—during a period in which their work was largely excluded from institutional exhibitions and conversations.

Created for the cover of the counterculture newspaper The East Village Other (1965–72), the flaming, eye-popping, and tongue-wrenching figure of Burned Out suggests a character whose internal panic is mirrored by an alarming physical transformation. Crumb describes this drawing as "the end of the 1960s" and a visual representation of a time when the psychedelic drug use and free love of the decade's counterculture movement crashed into the new reality of an increasingly conservative political environment. As a key figure in the underground comics movement of the late 1960s, Crumb's humorous—and often raunchily stylized—characters recognized the inscrutability of the world.

In Dufus Mike Henderson explores the malleability of identity by performing a series of stereotypes: a weary janitor, a peace-loving hippie, a sex worker, a beatnik, a "Good-time Charlie" (a fur coat-clad, cigarette-smoking dandy), and a theatrical version of himself, an artist. Henderson shifts between these identities seamlessly but not without some torment, as evidenced by the characters' exaggerated erasure of what came before. This work, more conceptual and experimental than Henderson's "Protest Paintings" of the 1960s, points to the ever-shifting expectations of modern identity.

This is a working drawing for Ed Ruscha's photograph Surrealism Soaped and Scrubbed (1966), which was on the cover of the September 1966 issue of the magazine Artforum (1962– ). This special issue included essays on Surrealism from historical, architectural, filmic, and personal perspectives, including those by critics Lucy Lippard and William Rubin. Using the pseudonym "Eddie Russia," Ruscha worked as a production designer and art director at the magazine from 1965 to 1969, a time when he was leaning into the use of typography and language in his art. This sudsing of surrealism exemplifies Ruscha's unique blend of Pop Art's lush stylization and Conceptual art's removed austerity, along with his deadpan humor.

"As a Negro, I do not need to go looking for 'happenings,' the absurd, or the surreal, because I have seen things out of my studio window on 125th Street that neither Dalí nor Beckett nor Ionesco could have thought possible." In this quote from 1964, Romare Bearden reflects on his experience being Black in America. Here he depicts not Harlem but Pittsburgh, where he briefly lived with his grandparents and spent time with steel workers. He represents the city by combining found images and enlarging the photographically, making photomontages that morph his memories of the city into spiritual and political rituals.