The National Gallery of Art (NGA) is planning a major exhibition about the shifting relationship between America’s self-taught artists and its mainstream Modern and contemporary art. The show is being organized by the leading curator and scholar, Lynne Cooke, who in August became the national gallery’s senior curator of special projects in Modern art. She was the Andrew W. Mellon professor at the gallery’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (2012-14), which provided the opportunity to undertake the in-depth research for the exhibition and accompanying publication.

“It is not a survey,” she tells The Art Newspaper, “but it does embrace almost a century.”