Daniel LaRue Johnson at the Whitney Museum of American Art

Daniel LaRue Johnson, 'Freedom Now, Number 1, August 13, 1963 - January 14, 1964', 1964 is included in 'Sixties Surreal' at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York through 19 January 2026.

 

This exhibition focuses on American art from 1958 to 1972, exploring the era's psychosexual, fantastical, and revolutionary tendencies, undergirded by the imprint of historical Surrealism and its broad dissemination.

 

In 1963, inspired by the intensifying Civil Rights Movement, Daniel LaRue Johnson conducted research in ten southern states and collected objects for his constructions. They included a dismembered doll, a mousetrap, a hacksaw, and a “Freedom Now” button—a relic of the Congress of Racial Equality, an interracial activist group that organized freedom rides protesting segregation. The objects are almost entirely obscured by pitch—a resin used for waterproofing boats as well as tarring individuals for public torture—and evoke the domestic and mundane threat of violence.

 

'Freedom Now, Number 1, August 13, 1963 - January 14, 1964' is held in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.