Sixties Surreal
Sun, Sep 14
|Whitney Museum of American Art
A wild, visionary dive into America’s surreal ‘60s—where the line between fantasy and reality evaporates.
Time & Location
Sep 14, 2025, 7:00 AM – Jan 19, 2026, 11:00 PM
Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort St, New York, NY 10014, USA
About the event
September 24, 2025 – January 19, 2026
Whitney Museum of American Art
Member Previews: September 18–22, 2025
In a groundbreaking revision of postwar American art, Sixties Surreal repositions the years 1958 to 1972 through a lens of the uncanny, fantastical, and deeply subversive. This bold survey highlights how over 100 artists responded to an increasingly surreal reality, blurring the boundaries of psychosexuality, political unrest, and historical rupture through radically imaginative work.
With an emphasis on both renowned names and long-overlooked visionaries, Sixties Surreal features works by Yayoi Kusama, David Hammons, Louise Bourgeois, Nancy Grossman, Mel Casas, Romare Bearden, and many more. The show reveals how the vernacular surrealism of the 1960s—shaped by civil rights struggles, feminist awakenings, and hallucinatory counterculture—found expression across mediums and regions, from the East Village to the Bay Area.
Unlike traditional readings of the ‘60s rooted in Pop, Minimalism, or Conceptual Art, this exhibition emphasizes the decade’s deep subconscious…