“How do you teach racial literacy to the reader through visual literacy?” asked the late cultural historian, writer and curator Maurice Berger in a Interview from 2018. As a research professor and chief curator at the Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture (CADVC) at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), he asked this question in reference to the mission of his monthly “Race Stories” column for the New York Times‘s photojournalism blog Lens, which ran from 2012 to 2019.
Berger, who died in 2020 at the age of 63, was a lifelong advocate for social justice and a groundbreaking art historian whose influence still resonates today. This Thursday, December 5, UMBC will commemorate Berger’s life with the official launch from the Maurice Berger CADVC Program Fund, which will continue its work of researching and exploring the history of race and visual culture by supporting relevant publicly accessible projects.
Throughout his work, Berger sought to expose the reality of race through the powerful language of photography and visual culture, dissecting images as they emerged from 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ Rally in Charlottesville or Gordon Parks’ documentary photographs of Jim Crow segregation and the civil rights era. This week’s event at UMBC’s Fine Arts Recital Hall will also celebrate the upcoming book Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Imagesco-published by Aperture and the New York Timeswhich revisits some 70 of Berger’s incisive essays for the Lens blog, along with the photographs that inspired them.
Curated by curator and writer Marvin Heiferman, Berger’s wife, the book is divided into five thematic chapters that revolve around reexamining the past, representational strategies, understanding the present, enacting change, and visualizing common connections.
“The idea of self-representation is extremely important to him, and to help white people understand their own prejudices, to work against the idea that racism is a Southern phenomenon,” Heiferman said. Hyperallergic.
Racing stories includes Berger’s essays that engage with all types of imagery, from 19th-century daguerrotypes to images circulating on social media. The cover features one of Maurice’s favorite photographs, taken by Gordon Parks, showing Joann Thornton Wilson and her niece Shirley Anne Kirksey outside an Alabama movie theater in 1965.
The first project supported by the Maurice Berger CADVC Program Fund, the publication of the printed booklet Cockeysville to Baltimore of UMBC’s current artist-in-residence Levester Williams, will also be recognized during Thursday’s ceremony. To accompany the current exhibition Levester Williams: All matters asideto view at CADVC through December 14, it examines the racial history of the marble sourced from a quarry about 20 miles north of Baltimore, which can be found throughout the city and at other locations in the Northeast region.
CADVC Executive Director and Chief Curator Rebecca Uchill, who stepped into the dual role in 2022, explained that the fund was created in collaboration with Heiferman and Berger’s friends and colleagues. Uchill said Hyperallergic that a book by multimedia artist Tomashi Jackson, who has been participating in a research residency at CADVC since 2022, will be the next publication sponsored by the Maurice Berger CADVC Program Fund. It will be edited by her free-time collaborator Nia K. Evans.
More details about the launch event on December 5, which will include the debut of a Williams’s semi-permanent public art projection series affiliated with the all matters aside exhibition and addresses of Heiferman, Uchill and art historians, curators and researchers can be found here.
