Mabel Dwight: Cool Head, Warm Heart

Celebrating one of the most notable American printmakers of the 1920s and 1930s, Mabel Dwight: Cool Head, Warm Heart foregrounds Mabel Dwight’s vivid portrayals of New York’s people, theaters, streets, and everyday rituals, rendered through a democratic print medium and a keen sense of composition.

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, working closely with its director, Juliana Force, a foundational chapter in what would later become the Whitney Museum of American Art. 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. The Whitney holds nearly a third of her lithographs, and her work remains a gimlet-eyed, affectionate portrait of urban life. 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.