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.

At the Whitney, Sixties Surreal attends 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.