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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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.

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

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Ralph Arnold, Unfinished Collage, 1968

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