A groundbreaking new exhibition at the Whitney Museum is challenging the conventional understanding of 1960s American art by showcasing 111 artists who have been largely overlooked by art history. "Sixties Surreal," curated by Scott Rothkopf, presents an alternative narrative to the decade traditionally dominated by pop art icons like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jasper Johns.
"A generation of artists who were young in the 60s increasingly looked for artistic vocabularies that they could use to explore the weird and wild time they were living in," explained Rothkopf, who has wanted to curate this specific show since his student days in the 1990s. The exhibition argues that the 1960s' atmosphere of constant change - including fears of nuclear war, multiple sexual revolutions, the civil rights movement, and emerging drug culture - created what felt like "surreal days" to many young people of the era.
The ambitious exhibition presents a loud, immersive experience featuring screaming colors, bold humor, numerous depictions of human bodies, and even three full-size camels made of wood, steel, and burlap. "When you walk off the elevator, you immediately find yourself in a room with these camels, which are very realistic," Rothkopf noted. "It becomes this surreal encounter." The Whitney has incorporated unconventional elements including museum walls covered in bright red and blue, dark lighting to create somber moods, and tactile pieces like H.C. Westermann's "The Big Change" to deliver what Rothkopf calls "a body blow to viewers."
The exhibition prominently features marginalized demographics that were sidelined even during the supposedly freewheeling 1960s, particularly women artists, queer artists, and artists of color. Notable works include Martha Edelheit's swirling, psychedelic "Flesh Wall" depicting a chorus of women's bodies, and Joan Semmel's impressionistic and abstractly erotic untitled collage. "Women artists are such a huge protagonist in this story, because they were looking for new ways to explore the life that they were living and throw off dominant ideologies," Rothkopf explained.
Feminist photographer and director Barbara Hammer is represented with two photographs and her first film "Schizy," about which she said it "was about learning how to see double. What was the reality I saw? And what was expected of me? And how did other people see me. So, schizophrenic." Shot through bifocal lenses, Hammer's work offered a deeply personal perspective on her fractured experience as a woman in the 1960s, launching what would become a highly successful film career that didn't receive proper recognition until decades later.
Native American artists receive prominent placement in the exhibition, including Linda Lomahaftewa, Oscar Howe, and Fritz Scholder. Scholder, who also received star billing in the Whitney's summer show "Untitled (America)" for his almost-abstract "Massacre at Wounded Knee II," contributes "Indian and Rhinoceros" to this exhibition. Lomahaftewa's "Untitled Woman's Faces" presents a stunning blend of texture, pattern, and color woven together into an abstracted landscape anchored by a haunting central face staring directly at viewers.
Howe's contribution features kaleidoscopic abstraction in jagged triangles of blues and reds that seem to swirl into a whirlpool, creating a sense of movement that continuously draws the eye in circles. Her work fused Indigenous beliefs with modernist aesthetics to create art that defied easy categorization. "Indigenous artists like Lomahaftewa or Howe didn't necessarily grow up in their training with the same traditional western American culture," Rothkopf observed. "Howe in particular had a great interest in painting Native traditions of spirituality and dance in these abstract and modernist forms."
The exhibition's curatorial approach deliberately goes off-script by engaging audiences with their full bodies in surprising ways. "We tried in the installation to create situations that heightened experience," said Rothkopf. "As you move through the exhibition you're on this journey of heightened senses. We hope people just feel it in their gut." This sensory approach supports the show's high ambitions to completely rewrite the story of 1960s art by centering previously marginalized voices rather than the canonized heart of the New York art world.
"If you flip the 60s on its head, the thing that seemed to be a sideshow to this grand march of isms was actually the thing - the major thing," Rothkopf argued. "What artists were doing from the west coast to the east, to the south in Texas up to Chicago. So the major story that we've told ourselves can almost seem a little esoteric, relative to the many artists who were engaged in this kind of thinking." The exhibition looks across the entire United States to pull the margins into the center of the art historical narrative.
For many of the featured artists, now in their 80s and 90s, the exhibition represents their first major museum recognition. Many of the surviving artists have participated in the show's opening, creating emotionally significant full-circle moments spanning decades. "This is maybe the thing I'm the most moved by," said Rothkopf. "Creating space for all these wonderful voices to sing together in a new way and to find an audience. It was thrilling to see them light up in the galleries in front of works they made as young people."
"Sixties Surreal" will remain on display at the Whitney Museum in New York through January 19, 2026, offering visitors an extended opportunity to experience this alternative vision of one of America's most transformative decades.
