Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Sept 24, 2025–Jan 19, 2026

The Big Rip-Up

Two overlays of a resting person's face in black and white, casting shadows on one another.

The Big Rip-Up

Before the women’s liberation movement entered wider public consciousness in the early 1970s, women artists were creating an early feminist aesthetic and imagining new fields of possibility for themselves and their work. For historic Surrealists, the radical juxtapositions made possible by collage were appealing for their apparent capacity to communicate unconscious thoughts and desires. For the protofeminists of the 1960s, collage offered a way to highlight the myriad social, political, and psychological expectations imposed on women. This technique allowed them to combine abstraction with representational forms in order to convey the complexity of their personal experiences. Although the presence of sexual content meant their work was often sensationalized as “erotic art,” such artists held an expansive set of concerns, from gender and sexuality to objectification and artifice. As the experimental filmmaker and photographer Barbara Hammer would later reflect: “I was swept up with the energies and dreams of a feminist revolution. We could make a new world where everyone was equal. We believed it, and we tried our best to live it.”

In the early 1970s, Barbara Hammer produced intimate black-and-white photographs of herself, her friends, her lovers, and her collaborators, giving shape and dimension to the artist's social circle shortly after she came out as a lesbian. One of her subjects was the artist and writer Tee Corinne, whose face takes on an otherworldly, mask-like appearance through Hammer's embrace of layered images, multiple exposures, and darkroom "mistakes" like smeared emulsion. Hammer would use similar techniques to represent the complexity and delight of female sexuality in her experimental filmmaking practice.

Colorful dress with abstract, geometric faces and shapes in pink, green, purple, and gold fabric patches.

Sculptor, painter, and self-taught fashion designer Jae Jarrell has been creating one-of-a-kind, wearable works that celebrate Black culture and family life since the late 1950s. As a co-founder of the Black Arts Movement's Chicago-based collective AfriCOBRA (founded 1968), she worked to promote accessible art experiences and cultural pride within Black communities. Drawing upon the group's signature Coolade colors (a play on the fruit-flavored drink mix Kool-Aid), using materials typically associated with "women's work," and taking inspiration from African designs, Jarrell imagined a revolutionary aesthetic carried on the body and grounded in joy and family.

Several nude figures in various colors lie on a colorful surface, with a table, flowers, and art supplies in the center.

To create the large-scale works that constitute her Flesh Wall series, Martha Edelheit typically painted from individual live models whose bodies she combined in the final composition. Flesh Wall With Table is a rare exception. Painted entirely from the artist's imagination, this colorful tangle of women's bodies seems unselfconscious and unbothered by the male gaze. Edelheit inserts her own self-portrait and worktable into this utopian landscape, as if to reinforce that the artist's hand and eye are responsible for this vision. Seen from behind in a rectangle of black and gray, Edelheit appears intent upon painting herself into this brighter, freer world.

A person’s face appears on a screen with a pink digital outline and green background, creating a glitch effect.

Shigeko Kubota capitalized on the emerging video technologies of the early 1970s to make her Self-Portrait, using the Sony Portapak and a synthesizer to manipulate her own moving image in real time. Rendered in riotous color and kinetic patterns, Self-Portrait imagines a version of reality characterized by self-determination and limitless possibility. "Once cast into video's reality," she wrote, "infinite variation becomes possible. Not only weightlessness, but total freedom to dissolve, reconstruct, mutate all forms, shape, color, location, speed, scale...liquid reality."

Colorful abstract painting with a face, geometric shapes, and vibrant patterns. A sun-like circle and a mix of blue, orange, and red hues.

Untitled (Women's Faces) depicts two figures as integral parts of a geometric landscape. The curved lines that define one woman's hair may also be read as a flowing river, while the stripes running across the other's face and chest resemble furrows of freshly seeded soil. Linda Lomahaftewa sought to honor her Hopi and Choctaw culture through artmaking, while also developing a personal visual language that incorporated the psychedelic aesthetics of California's Bay Area, where Lomahaftewa was studying painting at the time.

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Sept 24, 2025–Jan 19, 2026

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Exhibition works

The Big Rip-Up

Jae Jarrell, Ebony Family, c. 1968

Martha Edelheit, Flesh Wall with Table, 1965

Shigeko Kubota, Self-Portrait, 1970–71

Linda Lomahaftewa, Untitled (Women's Faces), 1965–71

Artists

On the Hour