# Undergrad Major Works on the Sixties Surreal exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art

**Source**: https://arthistory.yale.edu/news/undergrad-major-works-sixties-surreal-exhibition-whitney-museum-american-art
**Parent**: https://arthistory.yale.edu/news/2025-09

#### Undergrad Major Works on the Sixties Surreal exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art

September 29, 2025

I was thrilled to attend the opening celebration at the Whitney Museum of American Art for *Sixties Surreal*, the exciting show I worked on during my summer internship in the curatorial department. The exhibition, which *The New York Times* called “a thrillingly revisionist history” of postwar American art, features work from many artists with deep Yale connections, including Nancy Graves (MFA ‘64), Barbara Chase-Riboud (MFA ‘60), Claes Oldenburg (BA ‘50), and Eva Hesse (BFA ‘59).

I collaborated closely with the curatorial team on the show’s final stages, helping to coordinate loan agreements with over 150 institutions, private collectors, living artists, and artist estates. Seeing artworks in the Whitney’s storage facility and conservation lab also allowed me to engage with the objects up close—I learned that the cracks in Jay DeFeo’s drawing *The Eyes* originated from a leak in the artist’s studio and discovered that Nancy Graves’s life-size camel sculptures include goat and sheep hide. This summer internship also offered me unparalleled access to the art world, from hands-on roundtables with Whitney senior leadership to a daylong symposium at The Met with other NYC museum interns.

My Whitney experience drew on many courses I have taken at Yale with professors such as Edward Cooke, Marisa Bass, Pamela Lee, Jennifer Raab, and Alexander Ekserdjian, as well as my experience working in the American Paintings and Sculpture department at the Yale University Art Gallery under curator Mark Mitchell. I am deeply grateful to the Yale history of art department and the Bartels Art Museum Scholar summer internship fund for their support.

Tybee Feiler, Yale College ‘27