Dan Nadel, the Whitney Museum's newly appointed curator of prints and drawings, has dedicated his career to spotlighting the overlooked figures of American art history. This week, he unveils his most ambitious project yet: "Sixties Surreal," an expansive exhibition that challenges conventional narratives about 1960s American art by featuring artists who operated outside the mainstream New York art world.

The exhibition, co-curated with Laura Phipps, Scott Rothkopf, and Elisabeth Sussman, showcases a diverse range of artists including Luis Jimenez, Carlos Villa, Jae Jarrell, Shigeko Kubota, Ed Bereal, and Fritz Scholder. While the show includes recognizable names like Andy Warhol, Yayoi Kusama, and Jack Whitten, its primary focus is on lesser-known figures whose work has been marginalized in traditional art historical discourse.

"I like the strong personal visionary stuff that generally doesn't fit in the mainstream," artist Robert Crumb once wrote in a letter to cartoonist B.N. Duncan. Nadel quotes this letter in his recent biography "Crumb," noting that the statement could equally apply to his own curatorial philosophy. Throughout his career, Nadel has championed open-minded comic artists, unconventional sculptors, and experimental painters who were active during the postwar period but whose work didn't conform to the preferences of New York-based art magazines that favored Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptualism.

Nadel's prescient eye for overlooked talent has proven remarkably influential. His 2014 exhibition "What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to the Present" at the Rhode Island School of Design's art museum centered on the Hairy Who collective in Chicago and the Funk art movement in the Bay Area. The show garnered critical acclaim and was subsequently traveled to Matthew Marks Gallery in New York, leading to increased representation for artists like Suellen Rocca, a Hairy Who member who had little New York visibility beforehand.

In 2018, Nadel curated an eye-opening exhibition at Karma gallery featuring Gertrude Abercrombie, a Chicago painter known for her intimate interior scenes reminiscent of Surrealist art. It marked Abercrombie's first New York exhibition in over 60 years. The Whitney Museum acquired its first Abercrombie painting two years later, and the first traveling Abercrombie retrospective is currently on view at the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine.

The genesis of "Sixties Surreal" traces back to co-curator Scott Rothkopf's thesis on critic and curator Gene Swenson and his 1966 show "The Other Tradition" at the ICA Philadelphia. That exhibition posed a crucial question: What if subject matter, rather than form, had dominated postwar art? Nadel and his colleagues realized that subject matter never actually disappeared from American art – it simply fell out of favor in New York-centric discourse.

The curatorial team identified a network of interconnected group shows from the 1960s that featured overlapping artists, including the Whitney's "Human Concern/Personal Torment: The Grotesque in American Art" from 1969, "Funk" in Berkeley, "Eccentric Abstraction," the Hairy Who shows in Chicago, and MoMA's "Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage." Many of these exhibitions were critically dismissed at the time but featured artists having their first solo shows who would later be excluded from formalist art historical narratives.

Nadel's interest in marginalized figures stems from his early discovery of work that existed "in the gaps" – between art and design, art and comics, paintings and comics. He's particularly drawn to artists who employ colloquial or vernacular visual languages, which became marginalized due to postwar shifts in art historical emphasis. However, he emphasizes that marginality is relative, noting that many artists in "Sixties Surreal" actually showed in New York at least once or twice and participated in Whitney Annuals.

Geographic location played a significant role in these artists' exclusion from dominant narratives. Many featured artists were based outside New York in cities like Chicago, Texas, and Los Angeles. Nadel attributes their marginalization partly to "taste masquerading as theory," though he observes that old academic preferences have begun crumbling over the past 10-12 years. When he first showed Karl Wirsum in 2010, the artist hadn't exhibited in New York for approximately 25 years.

The art market has responded to this renewed interest in previously overlooked artists. Major galleries now represent Chicago Imagists, and there have been touring exhibitions for Christina Ramberg and Peter Saul retrospectives at venues like the New Museum. This shift reflects a broader reckoning with how formalist and conceptualist modes of the late 1960s and early 1970s were exclusionary in terms of race and class.

Nadel's relationship with comics has profoundly influenced his curatorial approach. Growing up "totally comics-obsessed," he found in the medium a "second language" that made sense to him. His early work focused on comics history, specifically seeking what had been left out – an approach he's applied to art history more broadly. Until recently, there was no infrastructure for studying comics history, leaving "acres" of unexplored material.

Addressing controversial aspects of some artists' work, including racist and sexist content in Robert Crumb's comics, Nadel advocates for taking artists "whole" while carefully choosing what to display. He believes it's important to understand when artists like Peter Saul deal with racial stereotypes through the historical language of caricature, acknowledging the complexity and messiness inherent in such work. His goal is never to make art feel "safe" while also avoiding harm to viewers.

Rather than establishing a new canon, "Sixties Surreal" aims to offer an alternative pathway for understanding the 1960s art scene. Nadel and his co-curators aren't seeking to exclude Minimalism or Conceptual art but to add to existing narratives. The exhibition provides a different set of players and ideas, creating what Nadel describes as "a map of new terrain or a new constellation" that encourages deeper exploration of artists like Karl Wirsum, Miyoko Ito, and Mel Casas.

The exhibition represents a significant moment in art historical revision, demonstrating how curatorial vision can reshape understanding of entire artistic movements. By highlighting the "irreducible and inexplicable" qualities that many of these artists pursued in their personal visions, "Sixties Surreal" reveals a rich alternative history that challenges conventional wisdom about American art of the era.