Outstanding Exhibition in a University Art Museum 2010: "For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights"

Contact: Thomas Moore
Director of Arts Management
410-455-3370
tmoore@umbc.edu

This release is available as a pdf file.

Maurice Berger, research professor and chief curator of the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, received a curatorial Award for Excellence, "Outstanding Exhibition in a University Art Museum 2010," from the Association of Art Museum Curators in a ceremony on Monday, May 16 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Berger was honored for his work on For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights, a traveling exhibition organized by CADVC in partnership with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

The AAMC prizes are among the highest honor afforded museum curators in the United States and Canada and the only awards voted on by curators themselves. "Each year our awards stand as the high-water mark for acknowledging the exemplary work of curators from across North America," says Sally Block, Executive Director of the Association of Art Museum Curators, "What is most impressive is the these are the only awards given to curators by their peers." In addition to Dr. Berger, this year's winners include curators from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Cincinnati Art Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, and the Dallas Museum of Art. This award affirms the high standing of UMBC's Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture in the community of art museums in North America and its place in the top tier of university art museums.

Symmes Gardner, the executive director of the CADVC, commented, "The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture is delighted that the Association of Art Museum Curators has selected For All the World to See as the Outstanding Exhibition in a University Museum for 2010. This award signifies the quality and depth of Dr. Berger's research in the area of race as well as the vision of the CADVC to produce programming which challenges us to address the important aesthetic and social issues of our time."

Maurice Berger
Dr. Maurice Berger is Research Professor and Chief Curator at UMBC's Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture. His writings on art, television, film, law, and the politics and culture of race in America have appeared in many journals and newspapers, including Artforum, Art in America, The New York Times, Village Voice, October, Pen America, Wired, and The Los Angeles Times. In addition to For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights, he has organized 25 exhibitions and is the author of eleven books, including the critically acclaimed White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), which was named as a finalist for the 2000 Horace Mann Bond Book Award of Harvard University.

Berger is the recipient of numerous honors, including multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts, the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award from Boston University School of Social Work, "Exhibition of the Year 2008" and "Best Exhibition in a University Museum 2010" from the Association of Art Museum Curators, and "Best Thematic Exhibition in New York, 2008" from the International Association of Art Critics, American Section. For his work on the "For All the World to See" segment of WNET Sunday Arts, Berger received an Emmy Award nomination from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, New York chapter.

For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights
For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights is organized by the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore County in partnership with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Through a host of media--including photographs, television and film, magazines, newspapers, posters, books, and pamphlets--the project explores the historic role of visual culture in shaping, influencing, and transforming the fight for racial equality and justice in the United States from the late-1940s to the mid-1970s. For All the World to See includes a traveling exhibition, website, online film festival, and richly illustrated companion book. More information is available through the online exhibition at http://www.umbc.edu/cadvc/foralltheworld/index.php.

About the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture
The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture is dedicated to the study of contemporary art and visual culture, critical theory, art and cultural history, and the relationship between society and the arts. The CADVC serves as a forum for students, faculty, and the general public for the discussion of important aesthetic and social issues of the day. Disciplines represented include painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, photography, digital art, video, film, television, design, architecture, advertising, and installation and performance art.

Since 1989, the CADVC has incorporated a number of public programs into its exhibition programming schedule to further impact the communities it serves. Symposia, lecture series, conferences, film series, visiting artist series, and residencies have all been fundamental in an effort to create an ongoing dialogue about contemporary art and culture. The Center has also initiated a number of projects with Baltimore and surrounding schools to integrate the contemporary artist and their concerns into the classroom. These projects take place on-site at both middle schools and high schools and are team taught by the instructors at these schools, professional artists, and students from the CADVC's Internship Program.

The Center produces one to two exhibition catalogues each year. Each document is fully illustrated and contains critical essays on the given subject by a variety of distinguished professionals in the field. Recent publications include Postmodernism: A Virtual Discussion and Paul Rand: Modernist Design. These books and catalogues are published and are distributed internationally through Distributed Art Publishers.

Since 1992, the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture has actively pursued the organization of exhibitions that contain the aesthetic, theoretical, and educational potential to reach both a national and international audience. Over the years, the CADVC has traveled these exhibition projects to a broad spectrum of museums, professional non-profit galleries, and universities national and internationally. Recent traveling exhibitions include:

- For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights (2010)
- White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art (2003)
- Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations (2001)
- Adrian Piper: A Retrospective (1999)
- Bruno Monguzzi: A Designer's Perspective (1998)
- Minimal Politics (1997)
- Kate Millett, Sculpture: The First 38 Years (1997)

Beyond the scope of these traveling exhibitions, the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture also undertakes projects such as the Joseph Beuys Tree Partnership. As part of the educational mission of the CADVC, one graduate thesis exhibition and one undergraduate senior exhibition are presented each year. This multi-faceted focus for presenting exhibitions, projects and scholarly research publications focused on contemporary art and cultural issues positions the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture in a unique position within the mid-Atlantic region.