Maurice Berger

Maurice Berger (May 22, 1956 – March 22, 2020) was an American cultural historian, curator, and art critic, who served as a Research Professor and Chief Curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Berger was recognized for his interdisciplinary scholarship on race and visual culture in the United States.

He curated a number of important exhibitions examining the relationship between race and American art, including the critically acclaimed ''For All The World To See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights'' co-organized in 2011 by 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, which focused on the role visual imagery played in shaping, influencing, and transforming the modern struggle for racial equality and justice in the United States.

On March 22, 2020, he fell ill and died in Copake, New York, from heart failure, exacerbated by untested complications of COVID-19. He was 63 years old.

Biography

Berger grew up poor in a predominantly black and Puerto Rican public housing project on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, an experience which helped to shape his views on race.
"Facing Down His Color as a Path to Privilege"
' "As a Jew, I have known anti-Semitism. As a gay man, I have known homophobia," Berger wrote in the ''New York Times'' in 2017 about his childhood. "But neither has seemed as relentless as the racism I witnessed growing up — a steady drumbeat of slights, thinly-veiled hostility, and condescension perpetrated by even the most liberal and well-meaning people. It was painful to watch. And, as my friends let me know, considerably more painful to endure."
"Using Photography to Tell Stories About Race"
' Berger received a B.A. from Hunter College in 1978 and a Ph.D. in art history from The Graduate Center, CUNY in 1988.

In the mid-1980s he was an assistant professor of art and gallery director at Hunter College. His interdisciplinary project "Race and Representation", co-organized with the anthropologist Johnnetta B. Cole at Hunter College in 1987, included a book, art exhibition, and film program. His study on institutional racism, "Are Art Museums Racist?", appeared in ''Art in America''. In the early 1990s, Berger extended his work on visual culture and race to include the 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 Harlem Document project of New York's Photo League, and the photography, writing, and films of Gordon Parks)."

In 2011, he served as curator of "For All The World To See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights at the National Museum of African American History and Culture of the Smithsonian Institution. According to The New Yorker, the exhibition posited "the camera—and the proliferation of black images in pop culture—as a crucial weapon in shaping public opinion and motivating change in America before and during the civil-rights era." The article further states: " tsevidence is rich and varied including film clips of Paul Robeson, Amos 'n' Andy, the March on Washington, Malcolm X, and the Supremes, as well as a wide array of printed matter, from copies of Ebony, Jet, and Sepia to a poster for ''Shaft''."

Publications

Berger wrote the monthly ''Race Stories'' column, "a continuing exploration of the relationship of race to photographic portrayals of race", for the Lens Section of the ''New York Times''. Berger's writings have appeared in ''Artforum'', ''Art in America'', the ''New York Times'' ''Pen America'', the ''Village Voice'', ''October'', ''National Geographic'', the ''Brooklyn Rail'', ''Wired'', and the ''Los Angeles Times''. In addition to his eleven books, which include ''White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness'' (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999) and ''For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights'' (Yale University Press, 2010), Berger is the author of numerous essays for anthologies and exhibition catalogs. ''White Lies,'' an experimental and largely autobiographical book, counterpoises short stories, vignettes, and analytical texts to examine the nature of whiteness as a racial category and to make it visible and comprehensible to the reader. The historian David Roediger has noted of the book, that its passages "gather classic accounts of what whiteness means . . . Berger's collage of provocations from experts on white identity coupled with bursts of poignant autobiography, destabilizes racial certainties.”

Exhibitions

Berger's exhibitions on race and culture included retrospectives of the artists Adrian Piper (1999) and Fred Wilson (2001) both of which traveled 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 and Max Becher, and Mike Kelley, among others. Berger advocated for more aggressive educational outreach and broader cultural and social context for high art in museums and created complex, multi-media "context stations" for numerous exhibitions, including ''Action/Abstraction: Pollock, De Kooning