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 in traditional clothing stands beside a large rhinoceros, with the letters "BIA" in the background.

"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.

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

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Fritz Scholder, Indian and Rhinoceros, 1968

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