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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A person’s lower face and mouth are visible, with the upper head missing against a plain blue background.

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.

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

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Rupert Garcia, Unfinished Man, 1968

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