Public Lecture & Seminar by Professor Lynne Cooke, Senior Curator, Special Projects in Modern Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC 9 August 2019.
At this free public lecture, Professor Lynne Cooke presented her research into the topic of ‘outlier art’, centring on her major curated exhibition Outliers and American Vanguard Art, 2018, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. She presented an exhibition history outlining key moments in the historical relationship between outlier and avant-garde art in the United States, and offered strategies based in her own curatorial practice as a means of acknowledging the artistic significance of outlier artworks and challenging the discrimination faced by artists who are self-taught, uncredentialled or excluded from artworld discourses.
Professor Cooke’s earlier seminar – hosted by the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne – addressed the provocation of what it would take to change or expand art institutions’ collecting practices in order to include works by outlier artists.