The Department of Art and Art History welcomes Lynne Cooke and Ingrid Schaffner for the 2016 Viewpoint Series.

Lynne Cooke is the senior curator for special projects in Modern Art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. Before arriving at the National Gallery of Art Cooke was deputy director and chief curator at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid (2008–2012); curator at the Dia Art Foundation in New York (1991–2008); artistic director for the 10th Biennale of Sydney (1994–1996); and co-curator of the Carnegie Museum of Art’s 1991 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh.

Exhibitions she has organized include Cristina Iglesias: A Place of Reflection, Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos, Blinky Palermo: Retrospective 1964–1977, Francis Alÿs, Fabiola, Zoe Leonard: You See I am Here After All, and Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years, co-curated with KynastonMcShine. Cooke wrote essays for the exhibition catalogs Matt Mullican: Subject Element Sign Frame World (Skira/Rizzoli, 2013) and Orthodoxies Undermined, “Great and Mighty Things”: outsider art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2013) and authored or written for other exhibition catalogues about the work of artists including:Alighiero Boetti, James Castle, James Coleman, Ann Hamilton, William Kentridge, Willem deKooning, Agnes Martin, and Richard Serra.

Ingrid Schaffner is an American curator, art critic, writer, and educator specializing in art history. Her work often coalesces around themes of archiving and collecting, photography, feminism, and alternate modernisms—especially Surrealism. Since 2000, she has directed the exhibition program as chief curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2018 Schaffner will curate the 57th Carnegie International. She is author of more than 20 books and nearly 200 articles, reviews, and features, ranging from SalvadorDalí’s Dream of Venus to The Essential Andy Warhol, from an essay on exhibition wall text to an art history of chocolate. She has organized monographic exhibitions of the work of KarenKilimnik, Barry Le Va, Jess, Jason Rhoades, and Anne Tyng, among others, and thematic group shows such as The Photogenic, The Puppet Show, Queer Voice, and Dirt on Delight: Impulses that Form Clay.

Schaffner attended Mount Holyoke College and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program, where she was a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow. She received a master’s degree in art history at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. After organizing shows for the Drawing Center, Swiss Institute, Haus der Kunst (Munich), Hayward Gallery (London), Independent Curators International, White Columns, and elsewhere,Schaffner was invited by then-Director Claudia Gould to reshape and oversee ICA’s curatorial department.

The Viewpoint Series invites leading curators, critics, and scholars of the contemporary art world for three separate visits every spring semester. Each visit lasts several days and is comprised of a public lecture and seminar, as well as private studio visits for current graduate students.