Visiting Artist Lecture: Jonathan Berger

Image courtesy of the artist

This virtual lecture is presented as part of the spring 2022 Visiting Artist Lecture Series, free and open to all. Registration is required. Live captioning is available.

Jonathan Berger’s work centers around the practice of exhibition making, encompassing a spectrum of activity concerned with a rigorous investigation of the many ways in which the exhibition site can be repurposed, and the subsequent potential for that site to allow for an expansion and reconsideration of what art can be and how it can be made. While his projects vary significantly, the exhibitions themselves are always the “work,” with the discrete parts contributing to a greater whole. He maintains an interest in abstract and experimental forms of both archival work and non-fiction, including embodied biography, portraiture, oral history, and documentary, as rendered through the creation of large-scale, narrative-based exhibitions made from both constructed and found objects.

Most recently he presented the exhibition An Introduction to Nameless Love, which was co-commissioned by the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard University and Participant Inc NYC, and exhibited at each venue in 2019 and 2020 respectively. The exhibition was created over a six year period involving some 47 collaborators in its production. His current project, The Store, at the Aspen Art Museum, exists as a hybrid environment that is at once a place of commerce, exhibition, and archive.

Berger has also presented solo installations at the Busan Biennial, South Korea; Vox Populi, Philadelphia; Maccarone, New York; Karma, New York; Grimm-Rosenfeld Gallery, New York; Frieze Projects, London; Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR; and VEDA, Florence, Italy. His collaborative and curatorial projects have been presented at venues including Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Hebbel Theater, Berlin, Germany; The Queens Museum of Art, New York; and Performance Space 122, New York, among others. From 2013–2016, Berger served as Director of 80WSE Gallery at NYU, where he mounted a wide range of collaboratively produced major exhibition projects presenting the work of Ellen Cantor, Bob Mizer, Printed Matter, James “Son Ford” Thomas, Michael Stipe, Vaginal Davis, Susanne Sachsse, and Xiu Xiu, among others. He is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art Professions at New York University, and he lives and works in New York City and Glover, VT.