Skip to content

Linda Lomahaftewa, “Untitled Woman’s Faces” (c. 1960s), oil on canvas (photo Lisa Yin Zhang/Hyperallergic) “’White Rabbit?’ That’s such an obvious Jefferson Airplane choice! I would have picked ‘Two Heads.’” Those were my first thoughts when I checked out the playlist for Sixties Surreal, a new exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

If you haven’t encountered an exhibition playlist yet, it’s similar to those mixtapes some of us made in high school: carefully curated, self-aware, and designed to capture a mood. In fact, I’m willing to bet that any curator who’s created a playlist was once a teenager with discerning taste in vinyl records and some mixtape experience.

Sixties Surreal, which opens to the public on September 24, spans 1958 to 1972 — a time in which history is inextricable from its soundtrack; whether you were there or not, it’s hard to imagine the ’60s without music. The show’s central question — what if Surrealism**,** rather than Cubism, had shaped postwar American art? — points to a latent strain in art in which unconscious, psychosexual, and emotional content predominated over form. If 1960s Pop Art seems to privilege surface appeal, plenty of the era’s music delved into the depths of the psyche.

Along with the ubiquitous “White Rabbit,” the playlist, embedded below, features an international mix of pop, psychedelia, R&B, and rock — including The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Isaac Hayes, and The Rolling Stones — along with a few avant-garde artists (i.e., Steve Reich, Sun Ra, Frank Zappa) and a solid selection of jazz, such as Thelonious Monk, Nina Simone, and Charles Mingus. (The songs can be accessed on Spotify, but they are not playing in the show, so come prepared with your phone and headphones if you want to listen while you wander.)

The exhibition’s co-organizer and Whitney Curator of Drawings and Prints Dan Nadel, who developed the track list with Associate Curator Laura Phipps, spoke with Hyperallergic about the concept of the playlist and the process of creating it. Of course, there will always be a music snob to pick it apart, but that’s part of the fun. We can all be inspired to make our own playlists — you can find a few of my own ’60s favorites at the end of this article.

---

**Hyperallergic:**For readers who have never encountered a playlist for an exhibition, can you talk about what they are and why a show would have one?

**Dan Nadel:**I suppose a playlist can be any number of things: a soundtrack for viewing, a parallel exhibition, a prompt for thinking about the ideas in a show, or just a fun dance party to take with you. There is a practical reason for a playlist — it offers another layer, like a catalog, to the exhibition experience.

Installation view of Sixties Surreal at the Whitney Museum of American Art (photo Hrag Vartanian/Hyperallergic)

**H:**Why have a playlist for this particular show?

DN: Music came on and off the checklist so many times as we struggled to find a balance between artists in conversation with each other in various ways and the material that swirled around them, like film, music, and poetry. The playlist allowed us to imagine the soundtrack of the artists in the show, generally speaking, as well as, broadly, imagine a soundtrack of the time itself — a 14-year span that so many people fondly associate with music.

H: What was the process of coming up with it?

DN: I started by remembering musicians that various artists had mentioned to us all along the way, or, in the case of Karl Wirsum, made work directly about. Then I expanded out by thinking about how, say, jazz changed from 1958 to 1972 (an enormous amount!), and likewise rock, but then also began thinking about different radio stations in cities across the country — what might’ve been on the radio in Houston, Chicago, Mill Valley, etc. Then it was just mixing it all together to create something that could never have existed due to genre, location, and time constraints — something that feels somewhat like our show!

Installation view of Sixties Surreal at the Whitney Museum of American Art (photo Hrag Vartanian/Hyperallergic)

H: Are there any songs that you were tempted to include but didn’t for any reason (e.g., too obscure)?

DN: The beauty of a digital playlist is that everything can flow in. It’s a rare medium that can handle unlimited intrusions.

H: Can you see the playlist becoming a more common feature in shows? Maybe even interactive at some point?

DN: I don’t know — I think it depends on the show. I love looking at art in silence, personally, but I also love offering something for people to listen to at home. So … I suppose it depends on the appetite of the audience and institutions.

**H:**Do you have any favorite tracks on this one?

DN: “All the Tired Horses” by Bob Dylan gets me every time!

Bob Dylan poster by Milton Glaser (not in the exhibition), created for Dylan’s 1967 Greatest Hits album (image source: Flickr)

Sixties Surreal* is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art from September 24–January 19, 2026.*

The following are my own playlist suggestions, based on the criteria that the songs date from 1958 through 1972 and I like them: Bert Jansch, “Running From Home” (1965); The Incredible String Band, “The Mad Hatter’s Song” (1967); Pink Floyd, “Remember a Day” (1968); Fairport Convention, “She Moves Through the Fair” (1969); Nick Drake, “River Man” (1969); The Velvet Underground, “Jesus” (1969); Amon Düül II, “Sandoz in the Rain” (1970); The Stooges, “T.V. Eye” (1970); Syd Barrett, “Octopus” (1970); Trees, “Glasgerion” (1970); Alice Cooper, “Be My Lover” (1971); Black Sabbath, “Into the Void” (1971); Marc Jonson, “Return to Relief” (1972); Roxy Music, “Ladytron” (1972); T. Rex, “The Slider” (1972); Redd Kross, 1984 cover of Rolling Stones’ 1967 song “Citadel.”

Natalie Haddad is Reviews Editor at Hyperallergic and an art writer and historian. Natalie holds a PhD in Art History, Theory and Criticism from the University of California San Diego and focuses on World... More by Natalie Haddad