Exhibition: The Sixties- Visual Revolution and Social Change
Artworks from St. Lawrence University’s Permanent Collection Curated by art historian Caroline Welsh
Above image: Peter Max, Untitled (election poster for John Lindsay), 1969, offset lithograph, SLU 2005.25
The 1960s was a time of radical transformation in the United States, characterized by groundbreaking shifts in art, culture, and politics. This exhibition explores the often disconnected interplay between Pop art, civil rights photography, anti-war imagery, and protest culture, revealing how art both reflected and shaped the decade’s upheavals.
Paintings, prints, photographs, and sculptures from St. Lawrence University’s permanent collection by major Pop artists of the day are juxtaposed with photographs from Nathan Farb’s “Summer of Love” series taken in New York City from 1967 to 1968; Associated Press wire photos that document the civil rights movement; and amateur photographs from the Vietnam War era created by U.S. soldiers, nurses, and civilians at home or in combat abroad. In addition, ephemera from the Owen D. Young Library’s Special Collections and private lenders add context to the works on display.
The exhibition invites viewers to explore the complexities of a decade that redefined American culture.
Pop artists embraced the commonplace and the commercial, making popular culture their subject. Coke bottles, movie stars, celebrities, soup cans, comic book characters, and other icons of America’s secularism and materialism became tools to celebrate, mock, and sometimes indict the commercial exploitation and affluence that had overtaken American culture in the 1950s and ’60s. Lichtenstein’s print Explosion exemplifies the movement’s embrace of mass production and media imagery.
Photographs absorbed unfiltered reality firsthand, making the viewer an eyewitness to the tragedies of multiple assassinations, the horrors of the war in Vietnam, and the violence perpetrated on African Americans, all reflecting cultural and social change in real time.
At the same time, the civil rights movement mobilized a decades-long fight for equality for Black Americans. In spite of legal gains, persistent racial prejudice and segregation prevailed. The movement launched peaceful sit-ins, demonstrations, marches, and bus tours known as “Freedom Rides.” Charles Moore’s stark photographs taken during the Birmingham protests in 1963 humanized the fight for civil rights.
The 1960s saw the rise of countercultural movements that challenged societal norms. From the “Summer of Love” to Woodstock, a younger generation embraced alternative lifestyles, questioning authority and advocating for peace, equality, and environmental consciousness. Artists such as Sister Corita Kent and Peter Max amplified these messages with bold, colorful, graphic works marrying Pop aesthetics with civic calls to action.
