Maurice Berger

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Maurice Berger cultural historian, curator, and art critic. Born: New York City, 1956

[edit] Biography

Maurice Berger is a cultural historian, art critic, and curator. He is a Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, University of Maryland Baltimore County and Senior Fellow at The Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School. A student of the pioneering theoretical art historian, Rosalind E. Krauss, he completed his doctoral studies in art history and critical theory at the City University of New York in 1988. He soon turned his attention to an early and abiding interest: race. One of the few white kids in his low-income housing project on Manhattan's Lower East Side, Berger grew up hyper-sensitized to race in the charged environment of New York City in the sixties. It was his experiences as a child and young adult that eventually compelled him to look beyond the heady world of "critical theory" in an effort to better understand the relevance of visual culture, and especially images of race, to everyday life.

Berger was one of the first art historians to engage the issues of racism, whiteness, and contemporary race relations and their connection to visual culture in the United States. His show, Race and Representation (1987, co-curated with Lowery Stokes Sims), for example, was the earliest major art exhibition to examine the issue of white racism. His other projects on race and culture include retrospectives of the artists Adrian Piper (1999) and Fred Wilson (2001), both traveling extensively in the United States and Canada. In 2003, he organized the exhibition White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art, which featured the work of Cindy Sherman, Nayland Blake, William Kentridge, Wendy Ewald, Gary Simmons, Paul McCarthy, Nikki S. Lee, Andrea Robbins & Max Becher, and Mike Kelley, among others. Venues for his groundbreaking exhibitions have included, The Addison Gallery of American Art, Barbican Centre (London), Corcoran Gallery of Art, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, Jewish Museum (New York), International Center of Photography, The New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York), Santa Monica Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem, The Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore, College, Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Andy Warhol Museum.

Berger’s writing on art, culture, and the politics of race have appeared in many journals and newspapers, including Artforum, Art in America, New York Times, Village Voice, October, Wired, and Los Angeles Times. His critically-acclaimed memoir, White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999) was one of the earliest books to introduce the idea of "whiteness" as a racial concept to a more general audience. The book was a finalist for the Horace Mann Bond Book Award of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research, Harvard University and received an honorable mention from the Gustavus Meyers Book Award of Boston University School of Social Work.

Berger has also been involved in a number of national and local initiatives around American race relations, visual culture, and education in the arts. From June 2002 to March 2005, he was Chairman of the External Advisory Committee of The Digital Library of The New York Public Library. He currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Center for the Study of Science and Religion, Columbia University (New York), Education Committee of Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Artistic Advisory Committee of National Foundation for Jewish Culture. He is the author of “The Crisis in Art Education,” a white paper requested by President William Jefferson Clinton for his Committee on the Arts and The Humanities (1995) and a Position Report, The Future of the National Endowment for the Arts, requested by the Democratic National Committee for the transition team of President-elect Bill Clinton (1992).

Berger is currently organizing Color Pictures: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights--a joint venture of the National Museum of African American History and Culture of the Smithsonian Institution and the Center for Art, Design & Visual Culture at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Color Pictures is the first comprehensive exhibition and book to examine the roles played by visual images in shaping, influencing, and transforming the modern struggle for racial equality and justice in the United States.

[edit] Publications

Books:

Color Pictures: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Yale, 2008)

The 1980s: A Virtual Discussion (Georgia O’Keeffe Research Center/CADVC, 2007)

Museums of Tomorrow: A Virtual Discussion (Georgia O’Keeffe Research Center/CADVC, 2005)

Masterworks of the Jewish Museum (Yale, 2004)

White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art (CADVC/DAP, 2004)

Postmodernism: A Virtual Discussion (Georgia O’Keeffe Research Center/CAVC, 2003)

Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations, 1979-2000 (CADVC/DAP, 2002)

White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999)

Adrian Piper: A Retrospective (CADVC/DAP, 1999)

The Crisis of Criticism (The New Press, 1998)

Constructing Masculinity (Routledge, 1995)

Modern Art and Society (HarperCollins, 1994)

How Art Becomes History (HarperCollins, 1992)

Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s (Harper & Row, 1989)

Recent Selected Essays:

“Falling Into Place,” in Andrea Robbins and Max Becher: The Transportation of Place (Aperture, 2006)

“Secrets and Lies,” in Jenny Holzer: Truth Before Power (Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2004)

“Last Exit to Brooklyn,” in Alexis Rockman: “Manifest Destiny” (The Brooklyn Museum of Art, 2004)

“The Value of Things Not Said: Some Thoughts on Interracial Friendship,” in Emily Bernard, ed., Some of My Best Friends: Writings on Interracial Friendships (HarperCollins, 2004)

“Epilogue: The Modigliani Myth,” in Mason Klein, ed., Modigliani: Beyond the Myth (Yale University Press and The Jewish Museum, 2004)

“The Cat Upstairs,” (on Sammy Davis, Jr.) in J. Hoberman and Jeff Shandler, eds. Entertaining America: Jews in the Media (Princeton University Press and The Jewish Museum, 2003)

“Introduction: Gravity’s Rainbow,” in Adam Weinberg and Hendel Teicher, eds., Trisha Brown: Dance and Art in Dialogue, 1965-2000 (Addison Gallery of American Art and MIT Press, 2002)

“The Image Under Erasure,” in Thelma Golden, ed., Gary Simmons (Studio Museum in Harlem and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago 2002)

“Picturing Whiteness: Nikki S. Lee’s Yuppie Project,” Art Journal (Winter 2001), pp. 54-57

“Andy Warhol’s ‘Pleasure Principle,” in Jonathan Binstock, Andy Warhol: Social Observer (Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 2000)

“Charles Demuth’s My Egypt,” in Adam Weinberg and Beth Venn, eds., Frames of Reference: Looking at American Art (Whitney Museum of American Art, 2000)

“Theater: A Pitiless Mirror Where Audiences See Themselves” (on Rebecca Gilman’s “Spinning into Butter”), The New York Times (23 July 2000), Arts & Leisure Section, pp. 5, 10