{"id":176030,"date":"2025-09-23T10:06:12","date_gmt":"2025-09-23T10:06:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/176030\/"},"modified":"2025-09-23T10:06:12","modified_gmt":"2025-09-23T10:06:12","slug":"dan-nadel-is-expanding-american-art-history-one-outlier-at-a-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/176030\/","title":{"rendered":"Dan Nadel Is Expanding American Art History, One Outlier at a Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\t\u201cI like the strong personal visionary stuff that generally doesn\u2019t fit in the mainstream,\u201d the artist Robert Crumb<\/a> once wrote in a letter to the cartoonist B. N. Duncan. Dan Nadel<\/a> quotes that letter in Crumb, his recent biography of the artist<\/a>, but it\u2019s a statement that may as well apply to Nadel himself, a curator whose work has centered those who exist on the margins of American art history.<\/p>\n

\n\tOpen-minded comic artists, wacky sculptors, and weirdo painters recur throughout Nadel\u2019s exhibitions, books, and writings. Many of these artists were active during the postwar period, and almost none of them made work that conformed to the dictates of New York\u2013based art magazines, which preferred styles like Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptualism. <\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Portrait<\/p>\n

\n\tNow, it\u2019s voguish to scour art history for figures such as these, to ask ourselves: What else don\u2019t we know? But it was not always that way\u2014not even in 2014, when Nadel curated \u201cWhat Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to the Present\u201d for the Rhode Island School of Design\u2019s art museum. That show centered around the Hairy Who collective in Chicago, the Funk art movement in the Bay Area, and other out-there groups and styles; to see it felt like gazing into another art history beyond the one taught in undergraduate college programs. Critics responded with due praise, as did dealers such as Matthew Marks, whose gallery traveled \u201cWhat Nerve!\u201d to New York the year after its debut. Marks ended up taking on Suellen Rocca, a Hairy Who member who had little visibility in New York beforehand.<\/p>\n

\n\tFuture shows by Nadel proved equally prescient. In 2018, Nadel curated an eye-opening exhibition for Karma gallery about Gertrude Abercrombie, a Chicago painter whose tiny paintings of cloistered, quiet interiors have drawn comparisons to Surrealist art. It was the first time Abercrombie had exhibited in New York in more than 60 years. The Whitney Museum acquired its first Abercrombie painting two years later; the first traveling Abercrombie retrospective<\/a> is now on view at the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine.<\/p>\n

\n\tNadel now works for the Whitney, where he was recently hired as a curator of prints and drawings<\/a>. This week, he will unveil \u201cSixties Surreal,\u201d an expansive show that aims to rewrite the history of the era. Working with co-curators Laura Phipps, Scott Rothkopf, and Elisabeth Sussman, Nadel has designed a show that includes figures ranging from Luis Jimenez to Carlos Villa, from Jae Jarrell to Shigeko Kubota, from Ed Bereal to Fritz Scholder.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe exhibition does not entirely avoid \u201960s giants: there\u2019s an Andy Warhol \u201cMarilyn\u201d print,\u201d a Yayoi Kusama chair strewn with phallus-like forms, and a ghostly Jack Whitten painting. But this revelatory show offers a fresh \u201cpathway\u201d for viewing art of the era, as Nadel put it, providing both a new understanding of much-loved artists and lesser-known figures alike.<\/p>\n

\n\tARTnews sat down with Nadel to talk about \u201cSixties Surreal,\u201d Crumb, and the value of comic books.<\/p>\n

\n\tARTnews: A lot of the work you\u2019ve done has centered around artists who could be called alternative figures or \u201coutliers,\u201d to borrow curator Lynne Cooke\u2019s term. What draws you to these artists?<\/p>\n

\n\tDan Nadel: I wouldn\u2019t say that I\u2019m drawn to outsiders or outliers because they are outliers\u2014that\u2019s not necessarily what I\u2019m looking for. When I was much younger, I discovered things in the gaps, so things that lie between art and design, art and comics, paintings and comics. I do like the mixing of things, and often that kind of mixing occupies an outlying area in various histories.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe fact is that for a lot of what I\u2019m interested in, the [visual] language tends to be on some level colloquial or vernacular. Because of the postwar shift in the emphasis of art history, this stuff became \u201cmarginal.\u201d When we talk about \u201cmarginal,\u201d it\u2019s like, well, marginal to whom? A lot of these artists were even showing in places like New York, or their work was making it there. I can\u2019t think of anyone in \u201cSixties Surreal\u201d that didn\u2019t show in New York at least or once or twice. Many of them were in Whitney Annuals or in group shows like the Whitney\u2019s \u201cHuman Concern\/Personal Torment: The Grotesque in American Art\u201d in 1969, which was critically reviled. It\u2019s just that the discourse took another path.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tInstallation view of \u201cSixties Surreal,\u201d 2025, at Whitney Museum, New York.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\u00a92025 BFA\/Quadir Moore\/BFA.com<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cSixties Surreal\u201d features many artists based outside New York, in places like Chicago, Texas, and Los Angeles. Do you think that played a role in their exclusion from that narrative?<\/p>\n

\n\tYes. I think it was sort of like taste masquerading as theory. And I think that\u2019s really changed as a lot of those old academic tastes have started to crumble in the last 10 to 12 years. When I first showed Karl Wirsum, in 2010, he hadn\u2019t shown in New York in around 25 years. Really, very few Chicago Imagists had at that point shown in New York in a very long time in any concentrated way. And now, there are major galleries representing these artists.<\/p>\n

\n\tDo you feel like something has shifted?<\/p>\n

\n\tI do. Who\u2019d have thought there\u2019d be a touring Christina Ramberg show<\/a> or a Peter Saul retrospective at the New Museum? When I did \u201cWhat Nerve!\u201d at the RISD Museum<\/a> and then it went to Matthew Marks in 2015, it was a huge shift. Certainly, Matthew had already started showing Chicago artists that were outside his normal program. I don\u2019t claim responsibility for this, but I do think there has been an enormous shift in the larger art historical discourse. Lynne Cooke\u2019s show [\u201cOutliers and American Vanguard Art<\/a>,\u201d from 2018] helped with that. Also, there\u2019s a reckoning with how the formalist and conceptualist mode, starting in the late \u201960s and early \u201970s, was exclusionary in terms of race and class. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a coincidence that Robert Colescott recently had a museum retrospective.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\n\tHow did you and your fellow curators start on \u201cSixties Surreal\u201d?<\/p>\n

\n\tIt really began with Scott Rothkopf\u2019s thesis on [critic and curator] Gene Swenson and his 1966 show \u201cThe Other Tradition\u201d at the ICA Philadelphia. The show was asking: What if subject matter, not form, had dominated postwar art? On some level, we forget that subject matter never went away\u2014it just fell out of favor in what became a New York\u2013centric discourse. We\u2019re trying to get at something similar about subject matter.<\/p>\n

\n\tThen there was \u201cHuman Concern\/Personal Torment\u201d at the Whitney. There was \u201cFunk\u201d in Berkeley. There was \u201cEccentric Abstraction,\u201d which was developed in some ways as a response to \u201cThe Other Tradition.\u201d There were the Hairy Who shows in Chicago. And then, of course, there was \u201cDada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage\u201d at MoMA, which traveled to Chicago. This all really accelerated in the \u201960s and then started tapering off in the early \u201970s as a kind of formalism took hold.<\/p>\n

\n\tWe started realizing that there were a series of group shows that featured overlapping artists. Many of these artists were having their first solo shows, and many of them fell out of the New York\u2013centric history that followed. There were all sorts of theoretical reasons, but there were also market reasons: people that lived in Chicago didn\u2019t have the kind of market support that people in San Francisco did.<\/p>\n

\n\tWe drew a map of all these shows. It turned out that there were key figures, like H. C. Westermann, who was very important. We asked: If we do a reconstruction of these exhibitions, what would that look like? Well, it sure would look like a segregated art world, so we didn\u2019t want to do that. Then it became: let\u2019s use these historical shows as a sort of scaffolding, to identify our own themes and make more room.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe epigraph of Crumb is a quote from Robert Crumb, who is in \u201cSixties Surreal\u201d: \u201cNo one understands . . . But of course, how could they?\u201d That could be something many of the artists in the show might say of their work.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the last 50 or so years, artists have been offering clear explanations for their work. Many of the artists in [\u201cSixties Surreal\u201d] were not doing that\u2014and maybe were even averse to that. A lot of these artists deal in the inexplicable and the irreducible, which is something I\u2019m very interested in.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tRobert Crumb, Burned Out, Cover for The East Village Other 5, no. 10, 1970.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\u00a91970 Robert Crumb\/Courtesy the artist, Paul Morris, and David Zwirner\/Lucas Museum of Narrative Art<\/p>\n

\n\tWere these artists rebelling against rational thinking?<\/p>\n

\n\tGood question. In talking with a lot of these artists over the years, I found they were pursuing their own personal visions, and the rebellion part was incidental. In some cases, there were artists who were very much making statements that were political in nature, to really push back against something. But the more inscrutable work is just somebody finding their language. Somebody might say, \u201cThat\u2019s awfully rebellious,\u201d but it\u2019s almost an accident.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tH. C. Westermann, The Big Change, 1963.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\u00a92025 Dumbarton Arts, LLC\/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York\/Image courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago\/Art Resource, New York<\/p>\n

\n\tHow much were these artists in dialogue with Surrealism?<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cDialogue\u201d is such a funny word. There are definitely things in this show that are explicitly [about that movement], like a Roger Brown painting explicitly calling out Duchamp, who wasn\u2019t technically a Surrealist. But my sense is that you couldn\u2019t not be responding to Surrealism in some way, just as if you live in New York, you can\u2019t see graffiti and have it not seep into your mind.<\/p>\n

\n\tMy sense is that a lot of this weirdness is also just a weirdness that recurs throughout American vernacular culture, comic books, and such.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe dissonance and the far-outness of it is eternally appealing to people looking for an alternative to whatever\u2019s around them.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tKarl Wirsum, Screamin\u2019 Jay Hawkins, 1968.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\u00a9The Estate of Karl Wirsum\/Art Institute of Chicago<\/p>\n

\n\tYou\u2019ve worked a lot on comics in particular. Did you grow up with them? What influence did they have on you?<\/p>\n

\n\tI grew up totally comics-obsessed\u2014they were my gateway. I wish I had a grand idea about why, but it\u2019s just what made sense to me as a kind of second language. Like a lot of people, I found Maus by Art Spiegelman, and I found Dan Clowes and Julie Doucet. It was a way of thinking for me. My earliest work was about comics history, and I was trying to find what had been left out. There\u2019s just acres of it, because until recently, there was no infrastructure for the study of comics history.<\/p>\n

\n\tOne thing I thought you did well in Crumb was dealing with the racist and sexist nature of some of his work. You must have had to deal with that for some of the artists in \u201cSixties Surreal,\u201d who are equally known for provocative art.<\/p>\n

\n\tI don\u2019t think of it as fortunate or unfortunate. Yes, with Crumb, some of the work is racist and sexist, but you don\u2019t get the person without the gnarly stuff. With the book, I did not want to moralize about it. And with the show, yeah, there\u2019s difficult work. We have to take these artists whole and then choose what we want to show.<\/p>\n

\n\tI think it\u2019s important to think hard about it. It\u2019s tricky. It\u2019s threading a needle, understanding that when Peter Saul is dealing with racial stereotypes, he\u2019s doing it in the language of caricature, a language that goes back 200 years, and that he\u2019s showing people the Other. But it\u2019s not clear-cut\u2014it\u2019s messy. I never want art to feel safe, and I don\u2019t look to it for affirmation, but I don\u2019t want to harm people. It takes a lot of care.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tInstallation view of \u201cSixties Surreal,\u201d 2025, at Whitney Museum, New York.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\u00a92025 BFA\/Quadir Moore\/BFA.com<\/p>\n

\n\tIs one goal of \u201cSixties Surreal\u201d to establish a new canon?<\/p>\n

\n\tWell, I\u2019m one of four curators, and we all have different ideas about it, but the short answer is no. I think we\u2019re past the idea of canons. I don\u2019t know what a canon would look like right now. <\/p>\n

\n\tWe\u2019ve tried to show how all these artists could [offer] a different vision of the long \u201960s. It\u2019s not to exclude Minimalism or Conceptual art. It\u2019s just to add to it. It\u2019s another pathway. I think the goal of \u201cSixties Surreal\u201d was to offer a different set of players and ideas for people to consider. We wanted to say: Here\u2019s a map of a new terrain or a new constellation. Go dig in deeper on Karl Wirsum or Miyoko Ito or Mel Casas. Follow some of these leads and see where they take you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI like the strong personal visionary stuff that generally doesn\u2019t fit in the mainstream,\u201d the artist Robert Crumb…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":176031,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[228,226,227,59603,229,88,23488,104918],"class_list":{"0":"post-176030","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-dan-nadel","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-newsmakers","15":"tag-robert-crumb"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176030","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176030"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176030\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/176031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}