Mel Casas, Humanscape #56 (San Antonio Circus), 1969, Acrylic on Canvas, 72 x 96 in
The Whitney Museum has unveiled a sweeping, revisionist chapter on the long ’60s with Sixties Surreal, which opened to the public on September 24, 2025. Rather than rehashing the decade’s familiar movements—Pop, Minimalism, Conceptualism—the exhibition reframes 1958–1972 through the electricity of the “surreal”: the psychosexual, the fantastical, the insurgent, and the unabashedly strange. Bringing together 111 artists across painting, sculpture, photography, film, and assemblage—among them Mel Casas—the show argues that Surrealism in America wasn’t merely inherited from Europe; it was weaponized, localized, and reborn to meet a country in upheaval.
