Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

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In the 1960s television brought reports of political assassinations, the oppression of protests, and the escalation of the Vietnam War (1955–75) into the comfort of American living rooms. The works in this gallery illustrate the many ways in which the violence and oppression of the era were experienced, internalized, and expressed through art. Some artists drew on the visual and literary vocabulary of historic Surrealism, a movement that embraced and extolled revolutionary actions, to communicate the experience of racial or colonial oppression. Other artists manipulated the very material of mass media to excoriate the culture it portrayed—framing violence as a kind of rupture in the fabric of logic.

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Painting of a head of man with red hair in a field of grass with grass coming out of his mouth.

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.

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

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T. C. Cannon, "Andrew Myrick – Let Em Eat Grass", 1970

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