Maurice Berger
Encyclopedia
Maurice Berger is an American
cultural historian, curator
Curator
A curator is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, a curator or keeper of a cultural heritage institution is a content specialist responsible for an institution's collections and involved with the interpretation of heritage material...

, and art critic
Art critic
An art critic is a person who specializes in evaluating art. Their written critiques, or reviews, are published in newspapers, magazines, books and on web sites...

.

Biography

Maurice Berger is a cultural historian, art critic
Art critic
An art critic is a person who specializes in evaluating art. Their written critiques, or reviews, are published in newspapers, magazines, books and on web sites...

, and curator
Curator
A curator is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, a curator or keeper of a cultural heritage institution is a content specialist responsible for an institution's collections and involved with the interpretation of heritage material...

. He is Research Professor and Chief Curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore County. A student of the pioneering theoretical art historian, Rosalind E. Krauss
Rosalind E. Krauss
Rosalind Epstein Krauss is an American art critic and theorist; she is a professor at Columbia University in New York City. In 1985 a monograph of essays by Krauss, titled The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths was published by The MIT Press.-Early life :Rosalind Krauss grew...

, he completed a B.A. at Hunter College
Hunter College
Hunter College, established in 1870, is a public university and one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York, located on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Hunter grants undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate degrees in more than one hundred fields of study, and is recognized...

 and Ph.D. in art history
Art history
Art history has historically been understood as the academic study of objects of art in their historical development and stylistic contexts, i.e. genre, design, format, and style...

 and critical theory at the City University of New York
City University of New York
The City University of New York is the public university system of New York City, with its administrative offices in Yorkville in Manhattan. It is the largest urban university in the United States, consisting of 23 institutions: 11 senior colleges, six community colleges, the William E...

. He then turned his attention to race.http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9901E5D9153CF936A35756C0A96F958260 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. Due to his experiences, he looked beyond the world of "critical theory
Critical theory
Critical theory is an examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities. The term has two different meanings with different origins and histories: one originating in sociology and the other in literary criticism...

" to address the relevance of visual culture, and especially images of race, to everyday life.http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9901E5D9153CF936A35756C0A96F958260

Berger engages the issues of racism, whiteness, and contemporary race relations and their connection to visual culture in the United States. He is one of the first art historians to meld the methodologies and practices of cultural and art history with those of race studies and critical race theory, work begun by Berger in the mid-1980s as an assistant professor of art and gallery director at Hunter College. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9901E5D9153CF936A35756C0A96F958260 His earliest effort in this area--co-organized with the anthropologist Johnnetta B. Cole at Hunter College in 1987--was an interdisciplinary project (that included a book, art exhibition, and film program) entitled "Race and Representation." His widely-anthologized study on institutional racism--"Are Art Museums Racist?"--appeared in Art in America
Art in America
Art in America is an illustrated monthly, international magazine concentrating on the contemporary art world, including profiles of artists and genres, updates about art movements, show reviews and event schedules. It is designed for collectors, artists, dealers, art professionals and other...

three years later, and helped spur a national debate on the exclusionary practices of American art museums. http://www.leopoldsegedin.com/essay_detail_making.cfm http://www.pearsonhighered.com/educator/product/Aesthetics-A-Reader-in-Philosophy-of-the-Arts-2E/9780131121447.page In the early-1990s, Berger extended his work on visual culture and race to include sustained study of the work of African-American artists, performers, filmmakers, producers, and cultural figures, culminating both in solo exhibitions ("Adrian Piper: A Retrospective" and "Fred Wilson Objects and Installations"), multimedia projects (including compilation videos and elaborate context stations for art exhibitions), and essays (on subjects as diverse as black artists and the limitations of mainstream art criticism, the racial implications of art historical and curatorial efforts to evaluate "outsider" art, the stereotypical representation of Jewish masculinity on American television, and the Jewish identity of the African-American entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr.).

Berger has also curated a number of race-related concept-based exhibitions, including 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
National Museum of African American History and Culture
The National Museum of African American History and Culture is a Smithsonian Institution museum established in 2003. It will be built on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.. In 2006, the Smithsonian's Board of Regents selected a site near the grounds of the Washington Monument and the...

 of the Smithsonian Institution
Smithsonian Institution
The Smithsonian Institution is an educational and research institute and associated museum complex, administered and funded by the government of the United States and by funds from its endowment, contributions, and profits from its retail operations, concessions, licensing activities, and magazines...

 and the Center for Art, Design & Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. This exhibition is the first to comprehensively examine the role played by visual images in shaping, influencing, and transforming the modern struggle for racial equality and justice in the United States. http://umbc.edu/cadvc/exhibitions/foralltheworld.php It opened at International Center of Photography
International Center of Photography
The International Center of Photography is a photography museum, school, and research center in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States...

 in New York in May 2010 and travels to the DuSable Museum of African American History (Chicago), Smithsonian National Museum of American History
National Museum of American History
The National Museum of American History: Kenneth E. Behring Center collects, preserves and displays the heritage of the United States in the areas of social, political, cultural, scientific and military history. Among the items on display are the original Star-Spangled Banner and Archie Bunker's...

 (DC), Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (Baltimore), Addison Gallery of American Art
Addison Gallery of American Art
The Addison Gallery of American Art, as a department of Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, is an academic museum dedicated to collecting American art...

 (Andover, MA) and other venues. For All the World to See was selected by the National Endowment for the Humanities as the tenth NEH on the Road exhibition, an initiative that will adapt the exhibition in a smaller, lower security version and travel it to up to 35 more venues, mostly smaller and mid-size institutions across the country over a five year period from 2012 to 2017. http://nehontheroad.org/SiteResources/Data/Templates/t3.asp?docid=645&DocName=For%20All%20The%20World%20To%20See

Berger is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities
National Endowment for the Humanities
The National Endowment for the Humanities is an independent federal agency of the United States established by the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities. The NEH is located at...

 and National Endowment for the Arts
National Endowment for the Arts
The National Endowment for the Arts is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government. Its current...

, and awards and citations from the American Library Association
American Library Association
The American Library Association is a non-profit organization based in the United States that promotes libraries and library education internationally. It is the oldest and largest library association in the world, with more than 62,000 members....

, W.E.B. DuBois Institute of Harvard University, Boston University School of Social Work, Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change of the University of Memphis, International Association of Art Critics
International Association of Art Critics
The International Association of Art Critics was founded in 1950 to revitalize critical discourse, which suffered under Fascism during World War II. AICA was initially affiliated with UNESCO as a non-governmental organization...

, Association of Art Museum Curators
Association of Art Museum Curators
The Association of Art Museum Curators was founded in 2001 to support the role of curators in shaping the mission of art museums in North America...

, and the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences
National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences
The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences or NATAS was created in 1955 to advance the arts and sciences of television. Headquartered in New York, NATAS's membership is national and the organization has local chapters around the country....

.

Berger is Political Director of PollTrack, a website that tracks "American elections and social and cultural issues from the perspective of where it matters most: with voters on the ground." http://www.polltrack.com

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. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B07EFDD1031F931A15750C0A96F958260 http://www.villagevoice.com/books/9907,roediger,4046,10.html http://www.thenation.com/doc/20000228/williams
The book was a finalist for the Horace Mann Bond
Horace Mann Bond
Horace Mann Bond was an American historian, college administrator, social science researcher, and the father of civil-rights leader Julian Bond. He earned a master's and doctorate from University of Chicago, at a time when only a small percentage of any young adults attended any college...

 Book Award of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research, Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 and received an honorable mention from the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award of Boston University School of Social Work. Other books include: Masterworks of the Jewish Museum (Yale, 2004)http://www.artcritical.com/DavidCohen/SUN64.htm; The Crisis of Criticism (The New Press, 1998)http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990DE5DA163CF933A15755C0A96E958260; 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 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9902E6D9103BF930A15754C0A9669C8B63, Village Voicehttp://www.villagevoice.com/books/9848,berger,1746,10.html, October, Wiredhttp://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.12/berger.if.html, and Los Angeles Times http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes/access/39310157.html?dids=39310157:39310157&FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&type=current&date=Feb+26%2C+1999&author=MAURICE+BERGER&pub=Los+Angeles+Times&edition=&startpage=7&desc=Commentary%3B+Look+in+the+Mirror+for+Racial+Attitudes%3B+History%3A+Ethnic+observances+mean+well%2C+but+it+takes+honest+personal+scrutiny+to+get+at+the+reasons+for+one%27s+own+prejudices. 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
Adrian Piper
Adrian Margaret Smith Piper is a first-generation conceptual artist and analytic philosopher who was born in New York City and lived for many years on Cape Cod, Massachusetts before emigrating from the United States...

 (1999)http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9407E1D71539F937A15751C1A96F958260 and Fred Wilson
Fred Wilson
Fred Wilson is a former politician in Ontario, Canada. He served as a New Democratic Party member of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from 1990 to 1995, and was a cabinet minister in the government of Bob Rae....

 (2001)http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0DE3DD173DF933A05757C0A9629C8B63, 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
Cindy Sherman
Cindy Sherman is an American photographer and film director, best known for her conceptual portraits. Sherman currently lives and works in New York City. In 1995, she was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. She is represented by Sprüth Magers Berlin London in and Metro Pictures gallery in...

, Nayland Blake, William Kentridge
William Kentridge
William Kentridge is a South African artist best known for his prints, drawings, and animated films. These are constructed by filming a drawing, making erasures and changes, and filming it again. He continues this process meticulously, giving each change to the drawing a quarter of a second to two...

, Gary Simmons, Paul McCarthy
Paul McCarthy
Paul McCarthy , is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California.-Life:McCarthy was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and studied art at the University of Utah in 1969. He went on to study at the San Francisco Art Institute receiving a BFA in painting...

, Nikki S. Lee
Nikki s. lee
Nikki Seung-hee Lee is a Korean American New York City-based artist and filmmaker. After earning B.F.A. at Chung-Ang University in South Korea in 1993, she moved to New York in 1994 and attended the Fashion Institute of Technology. She earned her M.A...

, Andrea Robbins and Max Becher
Andrea Robbins and Max Becher
Andrea Robbins and Max Becher are U.S.-based visual artists. They have worked collaboratively since they met at the Cooper Union in New York in 1984. They married in 1988.-Education:...

, and Mike Kelley, among others.http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A33515-2003Dec3 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B07EFDD1031F931A15750C0A96F958260 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/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976, Jewish Museum (2008) http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/02/arts/design/02acti.html?scp=1&sq=action+abstraction&st=nyt 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.http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D06EFD71431F934A35753C1A96F958260 Additionally, he was the curator of Hands and Minds: The Art and Writing of Young People in 20th-Century America, Corcoran Gallery of Art
Corcoran Gallery of Art
The Corcoran Gallery of Art is the largest privately supported cultural institution in Washington, DC. The museum's main focus is American art. The permanent collection includes works by Rembrandt, Eugène Delacroix, Edgar Degas, Thomas Gainsborough, John Singer Sargent, Claude Monet, Pablo...

, Washington, D.C. (1998), an exhibition, and a catalog with a preface by First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton is the 67th United States Secretary of State, serving in the administration of President Barack Obama. She was a United States Senator for New York from 2001 to 2009. As the wife of the 42nd President of the United States, Bill Clinton, she was the First Lady of the...

, on the importance of arts education that traveled across the United States.

Awards and Honors

Berger is the recipient of numerous honors, including multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Peter Norton Family Foundation, Trellis Fund, and J. Patrick Lannon Foundation. For his work on the “For All the World to See” segment of WNET Sunday Arts, Berger received an Emmy Award
Emmy Award
An Emmy Award, often referred to simply as the Emmy, is a television production award, similar in nature to the Peabody Awards but more focused on entertainment, and is considered the television equivalent to the Academy Awards and the Grammy Awards .A majority of Emmys are presented in various...

 nomination from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences
National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences
The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences or NATAS was created in 1955 to advance the arts and sciences of television. Headquartered in New York, NATAS's membership is national and the organization has local chapters around the country....

, New York chapter. http://www.nyemmys.org/attachments/wysiwyg/5423/2011_NY_Emmy_Nominees_June3%281%29.pdf His book White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999) was named as a finalist for the 2000 Horace Mann Bond Book Award of Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 and received a Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award from Boston University School of Social Work
Boston University School of Social Work
The Boston University School of Social Work , located in Boston, Massachusetts, USA is one of the 16 graduate schools of Boston University.-Areas of study:...

. His companion book for For All the World to See (Yale, 2010) was named Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2010, Art and Architecture from the American Library Association
American Library Association
The American Library Association is a non-profit organization based in the United States that promotes libraries and library education internationally. It is the oldest and largest library association in the world, with more than 62,000 members....

 and was a finalist for the Benjamin L. Hooks National book Award from the University of Memphis (2011), which recognizes a publication that best advances an understanding of the American civil rights movement and its legacy. http://www.memphis.edu/mediaroom/releases/may11/hooks.htm His curatorial honors include “Exhibition of the Year 2008” (Action/Abstraction) and “Best Exhibition in a University Museum 2010” (For All the World to See) from the Association of Art Museum Curators
Association of Art Museum Curators
The Association of Art Museum Curators was founded in 2001 to support the role of curators in shaping the mission of art museums in North America...

, http://www.artcurators.org/resource/resmgr/docs/aamc_press_release_2008_priz.pdf http://www.artcurators.org/news/65079/2010-Awards-for-Excellence-Announced.htm and “Best Thematic Exhibition in New York, 2008” (Action/Abstraction) from the International Association of Art Critics
International Association of Art Critics
The International Association of Art Critics was founded in 1950 to revitalize critical discourse, which suffered under Fascism during World War II. AICA was initially affiliated with UNESCO as a non-governmental organization...

, American Section. He has also received the Alumni Achievement Award from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (1998) and the Award for Excellence and Achievement in German Studies from the German Counsel General, New York (1977).

Sources and External links

Articles on Berger and his Work:

Roediger, David. “Books: White Lies” (review), Village Voice (23 February 1999), p. 125 http://www.villagevoice.com/books/9907,roediger,4046,10.html

Jefferson, Margo. “On Defining Race, When Only Thinking Makes It So,” The New York Times (22 March 1999), p. E2 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B07EFDD1031F931A15750C0A96F958260

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) http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9901E5D9153CF936A35756C0A96F958260

Cotter, Holland. "A Canvas of Concerns: Race, Racism and Class," The New York Times(24 December 1999)http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9407E1D71539F937A15751C1A96F958260

Hayt, Elizabeth, “Items Found on the Internet Dress Up an Art Exhibition, The New York Times (7 October 1999), p. C3. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D06EFD71431F934A35753C1A96F958260

Williams, Patricia. “Remembering in Black and White,” The Nation (February 28, 2000), p. 9. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20000228/williams

Dawson, Jessica, "The Darkness of White," Washington Post (4 December 2003), p. C1 http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A33515-2003Dec3

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 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0DE3DD173DF933A05757C0A9629C8B63

Jefferson, Margo. “Playing on Black and White: Racial Messages Through a Camera Lens,” The New York Times (5 January 2005), p. E1 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/10/arts/design/10marg.html

Smith, Roberta. "Rivalry Played Out on Canvas and Page," The New York Times (2 May 2008), p. E1. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/02/arts/design/02acti.html?scp=1&sq=action+abstraction&st=nyt

Patricia J. Williams. "The Buzz Board: PollTrack," The Daily Beast (25 January 2009) http://www.thedailybeast.com/beast-board/item/499/patricia-j-williams-/website

Cotter, Holland. "Images That Steered a Drive for Freedom," The New York Times(21 May 2010), p. E1 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/arts/design/21civil.html?ref=arts

Lee, Trymaine. "Black Like Us: In Pictures," AOL Black Voices (9 June 2011) http://www.bvblackspin.com/2011/06/09/black-like-us-in-pictures

Trescott, Jacqueline. "For All the World To See Explores the Impact of Visual Culture of the 1960s," Washington Post (9 June 2011) http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/arts-post/post/for-all-the-world-to-see-explores-the-impact-of-visual-culture-of-the-1960s/2011/06/08/AGSZnLNH_blog.html

Allsop, Laura. "How Posters and Badges Spread Civil Rights," CNN (1 July 2011) http://edition.cnn.com/2011/US/07/01/smithsonian.images.civil.rights/index.html?iref=allsearch

Ali Childs, Arcynta. "The Power of Imagery in Advancing Civil Rights," Smithsonian Magazine (October 2011) http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/The-Power-of-Imagery-in-Advancing-Civil-Rights.html
External Links:
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