Remade in America: American Surrealism with Joanna Pawlik

It is often assumed that surrealism did not survive beyond the Second World War and that it struggled to take root in America.

Joanna Pawlik challenges both assumptions in her book , arguing that some of the most innovative responses to surrealism in the postwar years took place not in Europe or the gallery but in the United States, where artistic and activist communities repurposed the movement for their own ends.

Far from moribund, surrealism became a form of political protest implicated in broader social and cultural developments, such as the Black Arts movement, the counterculture, the New Left, and the gay liberation movement. From Ted Joans to Marie Wilson, artists mobilized surrealism's defining interests in desire and madness, the every day and the marginalized, to craft new identities that disrupted gender, sexual, and racial norms.

Remade in America ultimately shows that what began as a challenge to the church, family, and state in interwar Paris was invoked and rehabilitated to diagnose and breach inequalities in postwar America.

Joanna Pawlik has worked in the Department of Art History, at the University of Sussex since 2014. Jo's most recent monograph, 'Remade in America: Surrealist Art, Activism and Politics 1940-1978' was published by University of California Press in 2021, and was joint winner of the MSA First Book Prize (2022). She has published research in journals including Art History, Literature Compass, and International Journal of Francophone Studies.

She received a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for her new project 'Draw the line: Figuring anti-fascism in American art, 1945–1980' in 2020.

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