Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

The jarring scene T. C. Cannon presents is based on the widely circulated, but possibly apocryphal, story of the nineteenth-century trader Andrew Myrick getting his mouth stuffed with grass after he was killed—retribution for his infamous comment: "If they are hungry, let them eat grass." Myrick reportedly said this in 1862 as crops failed and widespread starvation loomed in anticipation of the US–Dakota War, which resulted in mass death and the expulsion of the Dakota from their ancestral lands. Cannon, a Kiowa and Caddo man and Vietnam War veteran, was deeply conflicted about his experience in the army and used painting to reflect on the foundational, yet surreal, violence that war has perpetuated throughout American history.

Driving at night in San Antonio, Mel Casas was inspired by the distant sight of a drive-in movie theater screen. This scene led him to begin his Humanscape series, which explores different variations of this Americana iconography. Each painting includes a rectangular, screen-like image contrasted against a competing drama in the foreground, often parodying racist stereotypes of Latinx culture. Casas critiques Fiesta, San Antonio's annual festival commemorating the defeat of the Mexican army at the Battle of San Jacinto and the establishment of the Republic of Texas in 1836. Every year, the festival crowns a white Fiesta queen by the Order of the Alamo, a group that limits membership on the basis of race and class. Casas's painting asserts that the celebrated Texan revolution was actually an entrenchment of Latinx subjugation.

Rupert Garcia's Unfinished Man relies on abstraction to capture the disorienting and jarring experience of a disillusioned soldier reintegrating into an American society roiling with anxiety. After serving in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, Garcia enrolled at San Francisco State College in 1966 to study art and sociology on the GI Bill. He initially focused on painting but, driven by his critical perspectives on the war and racial and economic inequality, eventually began a lifelong engagement with printmaking as a cheap and effective tool of protest after joining in the student strikes of 1968.

"My painting called Indian and Rhinoceros has an Indian in full dress with a peace pipe posing with an ungainly rhinoceros in front of the Bureau of Indian Affairs [BIA]. My point, I believe, is obvious." An enrolled member of the Luiseño tribe, Fritz Scholder's statement underscores the cruel absurdity of the US government's relationship with Native Americans. The BIA, an agency within the Department of the Interior, was responsible for enforcing decades of federal policies designed to terminate tribal authority and relocate and assimilate Indigenous people. Galvanized by the escalation of the Vietnam War, in which Native American men disproportionately served, and the 1968 founding of the American Indian Movement (AIM), an activist group focused on Native American civil rights, Scholder felt compelled to address the violence of American history and the mistreatment of Indigenous people for the first time in his work.

Unfinished Collage offers a totemic monument to the fallen leaders of the 1960s. Ralph Arnold layered images of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. in life and in death, with each figure occupying one of the rectangles that wrap around the sculpture. A fourth rectangle is painted white, creating dissonance in the work—an interruption that suggests the unfinished nature of history itself as well as the viewer's role in imagining such a future. As a Black, gay Korean War veteran in segregated Chicago, Arnold engaged actively with the nascent gay liberation movement, civil rights actions, and protests against the Vietnam War.

Nancy Spero's War Series consists of antiwar manifestos or, as she called them, "a personal attempt at exorcism." The paintings feature American military weaponry, from helicopters to detonated bombs, reworked to resemble parasitic insects, reptiles, or male genitalia. Years before she created Female Bomb, Spero was living in Paris and witnessed the French police's violent response to protests against the Algerian War (1954–62). That experience, alongside the escalation of US involvement in the Vietnam War, led Spero to produce "angry works, often scatological, manifestos against a senseless, obscene war" and influenced her approach to antiwar activism.