Sixties Surreal

Through Jan 19

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

Linda Lomahaftewa, Untitled Woman's Faces, 1960s. Oil on canvas, 36 × 48 in. (91.4 × 121.9 cm). Heard Museum, Phoenix; Gift of the artist. © Linda Lomahaftewa

On view
Floor 5

Open: Sept 24, 2025–Jan 19, 2026

Sixties Surreal is an ambitious, scholarly reappraisal of American art from 1958 to 1972, encompassing the work of more than 100 artists. This revisionist survey looks beyond now canonical movements to focus instead on the era’s most fundamental, if underrecognized, aesthetic current—an efflorescence of psychosexual, fantastical, and revolutionary tendencies, undergirded by the imprint of historical Surrealism and its broad dissemination.  

Sixties Surreal recontextualizes some of the decade’s best-known figures alongside those only recently rediscovered. The exhibition gathers a range of works by artists including Diane Arbus, Lee Bontecou, Franklin Williams, Nancy Grossman, David Hammons, Linda Lomahaftewa, Mel Casas, Yayoi Kusama, Romare Bearden, and Louise Bourgeois, among others. In the 60s, many of these artists sought new strategies for connecting art back to a lived reality that seemed increasingly unreal due to rapid postwar transformation and the social, political, and technological upheavals of the later part of the decade.

At the Whitney, Sixties Surreal will attend to the ways in which historical Surrealism of the earlier 20th Century laid the groundwork for a kind of vernacular surrealism in the 1960s—particularly in America, as cascading social and political changes affirmed that life, itself, is surreal. The way in which artists working across the country—from New York and Philadelphia, to Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area—beheld and reimagined this reality will be among the exhibition’s central concerns, while also mirroring the sociopolitical extremes in which artists of the present find themselves working. The exhibition's title, Sixties Surreal, states the show's straightforward historic parameters while suggesting a new take on that history.

Sixties Surreal is organized by Dan Nadel, Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings and Prints, Whitney Museum of American Art; Laura Phipps, Associate Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art; Scott Rothkopf, Alice Pratt Brown Director, Whitney Museum of American Art; and Elisabeth Sussman, Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art, with Kelly Long, Senior Curatorial Assistant, and Rowan Diaz-Toth, Curatorial Project Assistant, Whitney Museum of American Art.

Sixties Surreal is sponsored by

Major support for Sixties Surreal is provided by the Barbara Haskell American Fellows Legacy Fund, The KHR McNeely Family Foundation | Kevin, Rosemary, and Hannah Rose McNeely, and the Whitney’s National Committee.

Significant support is provided by Susan Boland and Kelly Granat, and the John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation.

Generous support is provided by Sheree and Jerry Friedman, The Keith Haring Foundation Exhibition Fund, Ashley Leeds and Christopher Harland, and the Robert Lehman Foundation.

Additional support is provided by Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg, George Freeman, Gail and Tony Ganz, and Patricia J. Villareal and Thomas S. Leatherbury.  

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On the Hour

A 30-second online art project:
Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

Learn more about this project

Learn more at whitney.org/artport

On the Hour projects can contain motion and sound. To respect your accessibility settings autoplay is disabled.