About Viewpoint
Each spring, as part of the 20+ year Viewpoint Series, the Department of Art and Art History hosts a pair of leading art critics or curators for lectures, critiques, and seminars during three interactions with the UT Austin community over the course of the semester.
This year, the department presents Alex Klein and Dan Nadel.
Alex Klein
Head Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, The Contemporary Austin
What Can Exhibitions Do?
What Can Exhibitions Do and how do they invite us to behave? Klein will take up the notion of the group exhibition as a vehicle for the social through a series of past projects that have placed dialogue, process, and exchange at their center.
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Alex Klein is the Head Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at The Contemporary Austin where she works alongside the curatorial team to shape the exhibition program at the Jones Center and steward the sculpture park at Laguna Gloria. Her survey exhibition of Carl Cheng’s genre-defying practice, Nature Never Loses, opened in Austin in Fall 2024 and is currently traveling to venues in the US and Europe through 2027. Most recently she has generated exhibitions with artists including Jiab Prachakul, Lubaina Himid, Guadalupe Maravilla, Manik Raj Nakra, and Sable Elyse Smith. Prior to her current role she was the Dorothy and Stephen R. Weber (CHE ’60) Senior Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania (ICA). During her eleven years at ICA she originated numerous exhibitions, publications, public programs, and online initiatives. Previously she held positions in the Carnegie Museum of Art’s Hillman Photography Initiative, the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Roski School of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California (USC), and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. She has published widely and is a founding member of the arts workers advocacy group Museums Moving Forward. She received her MFA from UCLA, Los Angeles; her MA in the History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London; and her BA in Art History from Columbia University, New York.
Dan Nadel
Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings and Prints, Whitney Museum of American Art
Making Sixties Surreal
Nadel will discuss the exhibition Sixties Surreal, which he co-curated at The Whitney Museum of American Art. Sixties Surreal is an ambitious, scholarly reappraisal of American art from 1958 to 1972, encompassing the work of more than 100 artists. He will delve into the behind-the-scenes research process, the development of key themes, and the works of several featured artists as well as the recontextualization of these works in today’s world—an echo of how artists of the 1960s sought to reconnect art with lived experience.
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Dan Nadel is the Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings and Prints, Whitney Museum of American Art. He is the author of Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life, named by the New York Times, Washington Post, and New Yorker as one of the best books of 2025.