Last year museums and galleries around the world marked the centenary of André Breton’s first Surrealist manifesto. This exhibition at the Whitney takes a different tack, celebrating the many ways in which the Surrealist spirit found its way into American art between 1958 and 1972 (24 September–19 January 2026). Just as the Surrealists had been responding to a rapidly changing industrial and media landscape, American artists of the 1960s were working in an era shaped by television, changing sexual mores and political tumult. This display brings together works in a broad range of media, such as Barbara Hammer’s short film Schizy (1968) – in which the artist, using a Super 8 camera with a bifocal lens, experiments with double vision as a means of exploring her queerness – and Judy Chicago’s sculpture In My Mother’s House (c. 1962–64), an apparently abstract work that carries an unmistakeable sexual charge.
Find out more from the Whitney’s website.
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