The Whitney Museum of Art is set to open "Sixties Surreal" on September 24, promising to revolutionize how visitors experience art from the 1960s. The exhibition challenges decades of repetitive showcases that have turned the era's artistic movements into predictable museum fare, offering instead a vibrant and unexpected journey through one of America's most transformative cultural periods.
For years, the art world has been stuck in a loop when it comes to presenting 1960s art, replaying the same themes like a worn-out classic rock album. The major artistic movements from that decade - Pop art, minimalism, conceptualism, Land Art, and feminism - have become as fixed and unchanging as constellations in the night sky. Museums have mounted countless exhibitions celebrating Andy Warhol and his famous circle, Donald Judd and his geometric boxes, and Eva Hesse with her innovative synthetic materials. While many of these artists produced good work, and some created truly great pieces, most exhibitions featuring them have become predictably boring.
The Whitney's new approach becomes immediately apparent the moment visitors step onto the museum's fifth floor. Three massive double-humped camels created by artist Nancy Graves dominate the gallery space, creating an electrifying first impression that signals this exhibition is definitely not more of the same old content. These sculptures represent a complete departure from tired artistic vocabularies, replaced instead by a wild, post-minimalist openness and embrace of artistic pluralism that feels refreshingly unconventional.
When Nancy Graves first displayed these camel sculptures in 1969, Time magazine reported that many museum visitors suspected the works were part of an elaborate artistic joke or put-on. However, these skeptical observers were actually witnessing something much more significant - a dramatic opening up of artistic orthodoxy that would reshape contemporary art. The sculptures marked a pivotal moment when traditional boundaries and expectations in the art world began to crumble.
The sense of fresh air and artistic freedom only grows stronger as visitors move through the rest of the exhibition. In this reimagined presentation, the 1960s emerge as surprising, powerful, and creatively scattered in the best possible way. The decade's artistic output appears less constrained by categorical thinking and more alive with experimental energy and boundary-pushing creativity.
Despite its title, "Sixties Surreal" doesn't focus on traditional Surrealism associated with Sigmund Freud, André Breton, or Salvador Dalí. Instead, the exhibition explores visionary improvisation, erotic caricature, countercultural magic, fevered political expression, and psychedelic art that defined the decade's rebellious spirit. The show features familiar names like Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, and Claes Oldenburg, alongside a remarkable visionary painting by Robert Smithson, but presents them in contexts that feel newly relevant and exciting.
Featured artwork includes pieces from the Kiki Kogelnik Foundation in New York, representing the kind of lesser-known but significant artists who contributed to the decade's creative explosion. The exhibition succeeds in making the 1960s feel weird again - in the best possible sense - by stripping away decades of academic interpretation and curatorial predictability to reveal the raw, experimental energy that originally made the period so groundbreaking.
