“How do you teach the reader racial literacy through visual literacy?” asked the late cultural historian, writer, and curator Maurice Berger in a 2018 interview. 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 posed this query 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 trailblazing art historian whose influence continues to resonate. This Thursday, December 5, UMBC will commemorate Berger’s life with the official launch of the Maurice Berger CADVC Program Fund, which will continue his work of investigating and researching histories of race and visual culture by supporting relevant publicly accessible projects.
Throughout his work, Berger aimed to lay bare the realities of race through the powerful language of photography and visual culture, dissecting images like those that emerged from the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville or Gordon Parks’s 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 forthcoming book Race Stories: Essays on the Power of Images, copublished by Aperture and the New York Times, which revisits approximately 70 of Berger’s acutely perceptive essays for the Lens blog along with the photographs that inspired them.
Edited by curator and writer Marvin Heiferman, Berger’s spouse, the book is divided into five thematic chapters that revolve around reexamining the past, strategies of representation, understanding the present, effecting change, and visualizing communal connections.
“The idea of self representation is hugely important to him, and to get White people to understand their own biases, to work against the idea that racism was a southern phenomenon,” Heiferman told Hyperallergic.
Race Stories includes Berger’s essays engaging with all types of visual language, from 19th-century daguerrotypes to images circulated on social media. The cover features one of Maurice’s favorite photographs taken by Gordon Parks, depicting 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 print booklet Cockeysville to Baltimore by UMBC’s current artist-in-residence Levester Williams, will be recognized at Thursday’s ceremony as well. In accompaniment with the ongoing exhibition Levester Williams: all matters aside, on view at CADVC through December 14, it investigates the racial history of the marble sourced from a quarry about 20 miles north of Baltimore that can be found throughout the city and other sites 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 conceived in collaboration with Heiferman and Berger’s friends and colleagues. Uchill told Hyperallergic that a book by multimedia artist Tomashi Jackson, who has been participating in a research residency with CADVC since 2022, will be the next publication sponsored by the Maurice Berger CADVC Program Fund. It will be edited by her offtime collaborator Nia K. Evans.
More details about the December 5 launch event, which will include the debut of a Williams’s semi-permanent public art projection series affiliated with the all matters aside exhibition, and addresses from Heiferman, Uchill, and art historians, curators, and researchers can be found here.
