Lynne Cooke. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., has appointed Lynne Cooke senior curator of special projects in modern art, effective August 11. The Australian scholar joined the National Gallery in 2012 as a professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA). She has spent her two-year appointment researching the relationship between mainstream and outsider artists in 20th and 21st century America. This research will culminate in an exhibition at the National Gallery, which will then travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Exhibition dates have yet to be confirmed.
Prior to joining CASVA, Cooke was the deputy director and chief curator at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid since 2008, and a curator for the New York-based Dia Art Foundation from 1991-2008. She also served as artistic director of the 10th Biennale of Sydney (1994-96) and co-curator of the 1991 Carnegie International at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art. A former lecturer in the history of art at the University College London, she has served as staff at numerous academic institutions including Yale University in New Haven, Conn.; Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.; and the Malmö Art Academy in Malmö, Sweden.
Cook has authored catalogues on artists such as Willem de Kooning, Ann Hamilton, William Kentridge, Agnes Martin and Richard Serra. Recent exhibitions include “Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos” (2012-13) at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, the New Museum in New York and London’s Serpentine Gallery; “Blinky Palermo: Retrospective 1964-1977” (2010-11) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., and Dia: Beacon, Beacon, N.Y., and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College; “Zoe Leonard: You See I am Here After All” (2008) at Dia: Beacon; and “Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years,” (2007) co-curated with Kynaston McShine, at the New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
