Maurice Berger (1956-2020)

With enormous sadness, we mourn the loss of  Maurice Berger, a victim of COVID-19.

Maurice Berger was the first Vera List Center Fellow, appointed in 1993 by director Sondra Farganis. A formidable thinker, relentless seeker, beautiful writer, and passionate advocate for the marginalized, Maurice, together with Sondra, formed the intellectual heart of those early years of our center. He had been one of the key voices behind the lawsuit waged by The New School against the NEA and its introduction of an obscenity clause; he was the author of the first compilation celebrating The New School Art Collection, Patrons of Progress; he presided over numerous spirited luncheons, debates, and public programs; and he was a mentor to many of the subsequent Fellows.

Below are links to several programs he was involved in. Among the most significant was the film festival “White,” presented by the VLC in 2005, a razor-sharp forty-year history of the notion of “Whiteness” in film, starting with Imitation of Life (1959), and including To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Watermelon Man (1970), Bamboozled (2000), and Far From Heaven (2002), among many others. The festival accompanied Maurice’s groundbreaking exhibition White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art, at the Center for Art & Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore.

More recently, we were honored by Maurice’s contribution to our 2018 publication Art, an Index to Politics, celebrating twenty-five years of VLC Fellowships: he and Fellow Robert Sember engaged in a revelatory exchange on the evolution of “identity politics” between 1993 and 2009, when Robert became a VLC Fellow: Maurice authored the essay “Democracy in Vogue,” to which Robert responded with “Protocols for the Berger Project.”

We are at a loss for words. Maurice never was. Here is what he said about the fellowship in the same publication:

“I was awarded the first Vera List Center Fellowship in 1993, as it turned out, at a critical juncture in my career. As my work focused increasingly on race, my stock in a university and museum world largely controlled by white people declined precipitously. The Center — with the blessing and support of the amazing benefactor for whom it was named — provided a safe space to explore controversial and difficult issues. Out of that fellowship emerged a number of key projects, including White Lies, my experimental memoir on race and whiteness, and retrospectives of the work of Adrian Piper and Fred Wilson. I will always be grateful for the support and encouragement.”

Maurice Berger is a writer, cultural historian, and curator whose work focuses on the intersection of race and visual culture. He is research professor and chief curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “Race Stories,” his column for the New York Times, explores the relationship of photography to race-related concepts and social issues not usually covered in mainstream media. His writings have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Aperture, National Geographic, Village Voice, Brooklyn Rail, PEN America, Wired, and the Los Angeles Times. His books include White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), a finalist for the Horace Mann Bond Book Award of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard, and For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Yale, 2010). Berger was a 1994 Fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.
umbc.academia.edu/MauriceBerger