Maurice Berger

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

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 BA as a Thomas Hunter Scholar at Hunter College of the City University of New York and his doctoral studies in art history and critical theory at the Graduate Center of C.U.N.Y. in 1988. According to a 1999 New York Times profile of Berger by Felicia Lee, he soon turned his attention to an early and abiding interest: race.[1] 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.[2]

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.[3]He has made a sustained inquiry into this subject, in the form of books, essays, catalog texts, and exhibitions. His comprehensive study on institutional racism--"Are Art Museums Racist?"--appeared in Art in America magazine in 1990, setting off a spirited national debate about the nature and extent of prejudice in the art world. Berger has published extensively on the subject and has curated a number of race-related exhibitions. He is currently organizing For All The World To See: 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. For All The World To See is the first comprehensive exhibition and book to examine the role played by visual images in shaping, influencing, and transforming the modern struggle for racial equality and justice in the United States.

Publications

Berger is the author of eleven books on the subject of American art, culture, and the politics of race. His 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. [4] Reviewing the book in the Village Voice, the historian David Roediger wrote, "we know far too little about the origins of passionate anti-racism among whites, and Berger's frank autobiographical sections provide soaring insights. . . . White Lies brilliantly charts the decidedly nonlinear process through which intellectual work and everyday life taught him that the inhumanity involved in embracing [white] privilege carries too high a cost." [5] The legal scholar Patricia J. Williams, writing in The Nation praised the book for its uncompromising and "painful" honesty. [6] 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. Other books include: Masterworks of the Jewish Museum (Yale, 2004); 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). Berger’s writing on art, film, television, theater, law, and the politics of race have appeared in many journals and newspapers, including Artforum, Art in America, New York Times, Village Voice[7], October, Wired[8], and Los Angeles Times [9]. He has also contributed essays to numerous exhibition catalogs and anthologies.

Exhibitions

Berger's exhibitions on race and culture include retrospectives of the artists Adrian Piper (1999)[10]and Fred Wilson (2001)[11], both traveling extensively in the United States and Canada. In 2003, he organized White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art, which featured the work of Cindy Sherman, Nayland Blake, William Kentridge, Gary Simmons, Paul McCarthy, Nikki S. Lee, Andrea Robbins & Max Becher, and Mike Kelley, among others.[12] In a review in the New York Times, the cultural critic Margo Jefferson praised White as an "excellent show [that] focus[es] on contemporary artists who deliberately examine racial myths and constructs. In these works, assumptions clash with ambivalence; facts merge with imagination, and familiar sights fire off unexpected questions."[13] Venues for Berger's exhibitions have included, Addison Gallery of American Art, Barbican Centre (London), Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, Jewish Museum (New York), New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York), Santa Monica Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem, Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore, College, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Andy Warhol Museum.

In addition to his work on race, Berger has advocated for more aggressive educational outreach and broader cultural and social context for high art in museums, creating complex, multi-media "context stations" for numerous exhibitions, including Action/Abstration: Abstract Expressionism and its Crtics, Jewish Museum (2008) and Black Male: Representations of Masculinity, 1968-1994 (1994) and The American Century: Art & Culture, 1950-2000, (1999), both at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.[14] Additionally, he was the curator of Hands and Minds: The Art and Writing of Young People in 20th-Century America, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1998), an exhibition, and a catalog with a preface by First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, on the importance of arts education that traveled across the United States.

Bibliography

Recent Selected Essays by Berger:

“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, 2004); “The Cat Upstairs,” (on Sammy Davis, Jr.) in Entertaining America: Jews in the Media (Princeton, 2003); “Introduction: Gravity’s Rainbow,” in Adam Weinberg and Hendel Teicher, eds., Trisha Brown: Dance and Art in Dialogue, 1965-2000 (MIT Press, 2002); “The Image Under Erasure,” in Thelma Golden, ed., Gary Simmons (Studio Museum in Harlem and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago 2002); “Andy Warhol’s ‘Pleasure Principle,” in Jonathan Binstock, Andy Warhol: Social Observer (Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 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; and “Look in the Mirror for Racial Attitudes,” Los Angeles Times (26 February 1999), p. B7.

Sources and External links

Articles on Berger and his Work:

Roediger, David. “Books: White Lies” (review), Village Voice (23 February 1999), p. 125 [15]

Jefferson, Margo. “On Defining Race, When Only Thinking Makes It So,” The New York Times (22 March 1999), p. E2 [16]

Lee, Felicia. “Facing Down His Color as a Path to Privilege,” The New York Times (5 May 1999), pp. E1, 10; reprinted as “A Writer Confronts His Color as A Path to Privilege,” in The International Herald Tribune (6 May 1999) [17]

Cotter, Holland, "A Canvas of Concerns: Race, Racism and Class," The New York Times(24 December 1999)[18]

Hayt, Elizabeth, “Items Found on the Internet Dress Up an Art Exhibition, The New York Times (7 October 1999), p. C3. [19]

Williams, Patricia. “Remembering in Black and White,” The Nation (February 28, 2000), p. 9. [20]

Dawson, Jessica, "The Darkness of White," Washington Post (4 December 2003), p. C1 [21]

Holland Cotter, “Pumping Air into the Museum So It’s As Big As The World Outside,” The New York Times (30 April 2004), p. E1 [22]

Jefferson, Margo. “Playing on Black and White: Racial Messages Through a Camera Lens,” The New York Times (5 January 2005), p. E1 [23]

External Links:

• Excerpt: White Lies - Race and the Myths of Whiteness by Maurice Berger, published January 1, 1999 in The Multiracial Activist

• [24] Online version of exhibition, "White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art" with audio by curator Maurice Berger on Newsweek/MSNBC website

• [25] Interview with Maurice Berger, "Taking on Skin Color, Art and Politics in "White," NPR