Whitney Appoints Dan Nadel Curator of Drawings and Prints
184Aug. 15, 2025
The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, has named writer and curator Dan Nadel as its Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings and Prints. He arrives to the post from the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, where he had been curator-at-large since 2023. Known for his deep critical knowledge of comic-book art and for bringing attention to previously marginal art-world figures, Nadel is a cocurator of the expansive survey “Sixties Surreal,” scheduled to open at the Whitney in September. He is also the author of a well-received biography of cartoonist R. Crumb, titledCrumb: A Cartoonist’s Life, which was published by Scribner this past spring.
“Drawings and prints are my first loves and continuing obsessions, so the chance to dive into the collection and continue collaborating across the Museum is thrilling,” said Nadel in a statement. “I’m grateful for the opportunity.”
Nadel from 2018 to 2022 was curator-at-large at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at the University of California, Davis, where he curated exhibitions of work by Kathy Butterly, Mary Heilmann, and William T. Wiley. From 2017 to 2018, he served as the director of Karma gallery in New York. While at the gallery, he organized the first-ever New York show of work by Chicago-based painter Gertrude Abercrombie, whose mid-twentieth-century work was influenced by Surrealism and jazz. Among the other notable exhibitions he has curated or cocurated are “Chicago Comics, 1960s to Now,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2021); “Red Grooms: Handiwork, 1955–2018,” at Marlborough Contemporary, New York (2018); and “Karl Wirsum: Drawings, 1967–70” at Derek Eller Gallery, New York (2010). In 2011, at Los Angeles’s Prism gallery, he cocurated “Return of the Repressed: Destroy All Monsters, 1973–1977” with Mike Kelley; the pair co-edited the accompanying catalogue as well. Nadel also founded the publishing house PictureBox, running it from its 2000 inception through its 2014 closure, and served as a coeditor of the Comics Journal from 2011 to 2017.