Maurice Berger

Esteemed cultural historian, writer, curator, and educator Maurice Berger graduated with his BA from Hunter College in 1978. He continued on to earn a PhD in art history and critical theory from CUNY’s the Graduate Center, where he studied with former Hunter faculty member Rosalind Krauss. Throughout the 1980s Mr. Berger was teaching art history at Hunter College, and among his former students was curator Roxana Marcoci. In an interview Marcoci credits Berger for her early interest in and understanding of “the issues of race and class justice and the sociological underpinnings of photography.” Indeed, much of his life’s work deals with problematics of whiteness in the art world and the political implications of photography. The ideas he wrote about in “Are Art Museums Racist?,” an essay published in a 1990 issue of Art in America, became predictive and highly influential. 

Born in 1955, Berger grew up in a New York City housing project located on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Witnessing the adversity of his mostly black and Puerto Rican friends and neighbors fueled his quest to find a language to express the racism that he saw firsthand. In addition to teaching and writing, Berger mounted notable exhibitions including “Minimal Politics” (1997), “Adrian Piper: A Retrospective, 1965–1999” (1999), “Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations 1979–2000” (2001), “White: Race, Whiteness, and Contemporary Art” (2003), “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976” (2008), and “For All The World To See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights” (2010). Berger was the author of eleven books, including White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness; For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights; and Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television. He wrote for a range of publications, including Artforum, National Geographic, Village Voice, Brooklyn Rail, PEN America, and Wired. He was also the recipient of major awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, the Andy Warhol Foundation, and others. Maurice Berger passed away in March 2020 from Covid-19 at the age of 63.