Panel

White Lies. Race and the Myth of Whiteness is the prescient title of Maurice Berger’s first book, published in 1999. This tribute is an invitation to address the urgent challenges of the current moment through the seminal work of scholar, educator, curator, and New York Times columnist Maurice Berger (1956-2020), who was the first Vera List Center Fellow appointed in 1993. 

Berger’s seminal contributions to the studies of race and representation are illuminated by scholar Courtney R. Baker, Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III, artist Nona Faustine, New York Times writer David Gonzalez, and scholar Sarah Lewis, in a discussion moderated by curator Kinshasha Holman Conwill. The tribute to Berger, a victim of Covid-19, looks at three key areas his career — his foundational scholarly work; the orbit of allies, peers, and artists gathered around him, and to whom he was mentor and colleague; and his position as both an astute scholar and a passionate activist. An excerpt of Marvin Heiferman‘s Instagram account @whywelook concludes the exchange. 

Participants

Courtney R. Baker, Associate Professor, Department of English, University of California, Riverside
Lonnie G. Bunch III, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution
Nona Faustine, photographer and visual artist
David Gonzalez, journalist and co-editor, The New York Times Lens blog
Sarah Lewis, Associate Professor, Department of History of Art and Architecture, Department of African and African American Studies, Harvard University

Moderator
Kinshasha Holman Conwill, Deputy Director, National Museum of African American History & Culture

This event is preceded by a protocol-directed performance composed by VLC Fellow Robert Sember. It concludes with a video tribute by some of Maurice Berger’s colleagues and peers, and VLC Fellow Sarah Rothenberg’s piano recital of Morton Feldman’s last composition, Palais de Mari, recorded earlier this year and dedicated to Berger.

Courtney R. Baker is Associate Professor in the Department of English at University of California, Riverside. She earned her B.A. in Women’s Studies from Harvard University and her Ph.D. in Literature from Duke University. Her book, Humane Insight: Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death, was published in the New Black Studies series by the University of Illinois Press in 2015 (a paperback edition was published in 2017). Her research and teaching focus on blackness and visual representation. Her articles have been published in the Journal of American Culture and Parallax and in the online journals ASAP/J, Avidly, Huffington Post: Black Voices, and New Black MAN. Her chapter on African American visual culture in the 1970s will appear in the volume Black Cultural Production after Civil Rights, edited by Robert Patterson, to be published in 2019 by University of Illinois Press. Her current manuscript project, entitled “Tyranny of Realism: Twenty-First Century Blackness and the Ends of Cinema,” examines formalist techniques in recent American and British Black films in order to re-center film art as a site of Black politics and expression. In 2019 – 2020, she is a Visiting Scholar at the James Weldon Johnson Institute at Emory University.

Historian, author, curator, and educator Lonnie G. Bunch, III is the 14th Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex. Before his 2019 appointment as Secretary, Bunch was the founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), the nation’s largest and most comprehensive cultural center devoted exclusively to exploring, documenting, and showcasing the African American experience.

Nona Faustine is a Native New Yorker and award-winning photographer. In 2019 she was distinguished with the New York Foundation Arts award in Photography, BRIC Colene Brown Art Prize, Anonymous Was A Woman Award, and Finalist in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery Outwin Boochever Competition. Her work focuses on history, identity, representation, evoking a critical and emotional understanding of the past and proposes a deeper examination of contemporary racial and gender stereotypes. Faustine’s images have been published in a variety of national and international media outlets such as Artforum, New York Times, Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, New Yorker Magazine, among others. Faustine’s work has been exhibited at Harvard University, Rutgers University, Maryland State University, Studio Museum of Harlem, Brooklyn Museum, the International Center of Photography, Saint Johns Divine Cathedral, Tomie Ohtake Institute in Brazil and many others. Her work is in the collection of the David C. Driskell Center at Maryland State University, Studio Museum of Harlem, Brooklyn Museum and the Carnegie Museum, recently was acquired by the North Dakota Museum and the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum in Minnesota.

David Gonzalez is an award-winning journalist at The New York Times. Among other posts, he has been the Times Bronx Bureau Chief, the “About New York” Columnist, and the Central America and Caribbean Bureau Chief. His coverage has ranged from the Oklahoma city bombing and Haiti’s humanitarian crises, to chronicling how the Bronx emerged from years of official neglect, to in-depth reports on how Latino immigration is shaping the United States. In addition to his print reporting, Gonzalez is a photographer and the co-editor of the Times Lens Blog, which has become the premier internet site for photojournalists from around the world.

Sarah Elizabeth Lewis is an associate professor at Harvard University in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Department of African and African American Studies. She is the founder of the Vision and Justice Project. Lewis has published essays on race, contemporary art, and culture, with forthcoming publications including a book on race, whiteness, and photography (Harvard University Press, 2021), Vision and Justice (Random House), an anthology on the work of Carrie Mae Weems (MIT Press, 2021), and an article focusing on the groundwork of contemporary arts in the context of Stand Your Ground Laws (Art Journal, Winter 2020). In 2019, she became the inaugural recipient of the Freedom Scholar Award, presented by The Association for the Study of African American Life and History to honor Lewis for her body of work and its “direct positive impact on the life of African-Americans.”

Kinshasha Holman Conwill is Deputy Director of the National Museum of African American History & Culture. She works to fulfill the museum’s vision of expanding its collections, fostering external partnerships, developing exhibitions, special initiatives, events, and programs. She is lead editor for projects ranging from exhibition catalogs to books on the museum’s collections, including Dream A World Anew: The African American Experience and the Shaping of America and We Return Fighting: World War I and the Shaping of Modern Black Identity. An author, speaker, and arts and museum leader, she is the former director of The Studio Museum in Harlem, where she organized more than 40 exhibitions, and was a commissioner for an award-winning contemporary African art exhibition at the Venice Biennale. She is a former board member of the Association of Art Museum Directors, the American Alliance for Museums, and The Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts.

The Vera List Center Forum 2020 launches the center’s 2020-2022 focus theme, As for Protocols. Curated by Carin Kuoni and Eriola Pira, it is organized with the support of Adrienne Umeh, Heran Abate, Joshua van Biema, and Maryna Arabei.

The Vera List Center Forum 2020 is made possible by major support from Jane Lombard and the Kettering Fund, as well as the Boris Lurie Art Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Sigrid Rausing Trust, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and The New School as well as members of the Vera List Center’s board and other individuals.

This tribute reflects on the seminal contributions by Vera List Center inaugural fellow Maurice Berger. It is organized by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, with the support of Marvin Heiferman.