Maurice Berger, research professor and chief curator of the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, has been awarded a $30,000 Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation.

The grant supports research for Berger’s monthly column, Race Stories, for the Lens Blog of The New York Times. The blog explores the relationship of photography to concepts, themes, and social or regional issues about race not usually covered in the mainstream media.

Berger plans to conduct research on Robert Frank, focusing on contact sheets, notes, and shooting scripts for a two-part essay on Frank’s representations of race in The Americans. He will also conduct research for essays exploring parallel developments in African American, Latino, and Asian American photo-based art and photography from the 1960s to the present, focusing on the ways this work has challenged stereotypes and prevailing ideas about identity. More about the award can be found here.

Designed to support writing about contemporary art, as well as to create a broader audience for arts writing, the Arts Writers Grant Program aims to strengthen the field as a whole and to ensure that critical writing remains a valued mode of engaging the visual arts.