New show up on the third floor of @whitneymuseum : Mabel Dwight: Cool Head, Warm Heart features Dwight’s vivid 1920s-30s lithographs depicting New York’s people, theaters, streets, and everyday rituals.
Born in 1876 and raised in Cincinnati, New Orleans, and San Francisco, Dwight came to New York at the turn of the century as an illustrator and painter and soon became part of the downtown artistic community. She was an active member of the Whitney Studio Club in the 1910s and became the Studio Club’s first secretary in 1918. In 1927, at the age of fifty-two, Dwight began working in lithography and quickly emerged as one of the era’s most respected printmakers.
Guided by her belief that art should be made with “a cool head and a warm heart,” Dwight wandered the city from Harlem to Staten Island, sketching scenes of human drama, humor, and quiet resilience before translating them into lithographs via stone or zinc plates. For Dwight, lithography offered not only aesthetic freedom but also political purpose. It allowed her work to circulate widely and inexpensively, aligning with her self-described “Socialist” vision of dignity across class divides.
Mabel Dwight: Cool Head, Warm Heart is curated by Dan Nadel, Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings and Prints, Whitney Museum of American Art, with Eli Harrison, Curatorial Fellow, Whitney Museum of American Art.
Fab hand-painted signage by @pantero
Looking for something to do this holiday season? Don’t panic! You can have it all! Stay inside and read Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life and then head over to the Whitney Museum and see Sixties Surreal, on view until January 19, 2026.
Pilings is the apt title of Michael Williams’ incredible new show at @davidkordanskygallery Los Angeles. Autobiography via accumulation, humor, and spatial awareness. Wonderful, warm, beautiful paintings and drawings.
Sixties Surreal is open and we are gabbing and touring. Years of great collaboration with Rowan Diaz-Toth, Kelly Long, Laura Phipps, Scott Rothkopf, and Elisabeth Sussman along with a brilliant exhibition design by Melanie Taylor and Aseeli Coleman, aces publication gurus Beth Huseman, Joseph Logan, and Audrey Warne and so many other geniuses at my new home, @whitneymuseum
Sixties Surreal dream team featured in @nytimes by @deborahsolomon_truly - lifetimes of thinking with Scott Rothkopf, Laura Phipps and Elisabeth Sussman opening @whitneymuseum this month! Link in bio.
I’m thrilled to join The Whitney Museum of American Art as Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings and Prints.
I’m grateful to @kimconaty for welcoming me to this brilliant department. Looking forward to opening the exhibition Sixties Surreal in September with the inspiring @scott_rothkopf , @phippslaura and Elisabeth Sussman.
Dan Nadel visits MASS MoCA TH AUG14 to discuss CRUMB “A definitive and ideal biography—pound for pound, one of the sleekest and most judicious I’ve ever read.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times
A critical darling, Crumb is the first biography of Robert Crumb—one of the most profound and influential artists of the 20th century—whose frank, and meticulously rendered cartoons and comics inspired generations of readers and cartoonists, from Art Spiegelman to Alison Bechdel.
Can't make it? Follow the link to purchase a signed copy by Nadel
Hey it's the weekend! If you live anywhere in California you should go to San Francisco's finest art space: Cushion Works!
Enjoy things you'll never see again, including the original art for Robert Crumb's "Stoned," a compelling education in Couch Potato behavior by Robert Armstrong, and much more. Why would you do anything else?
