Jonathan Berger

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 nonfiction, including embodied biography and portraiture, 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. His current project The Store is on view and open for business at the Aspen Art Museum through the end of 2021. He has also presented solo installation projects at the Busan Biennial, South Korea; Vox Populi, Philadelphia; Maccarone Inc and Karma, New York; Frieze Projects, London; Adams and Ollman, Portland; and VEDA, Florence. From 2013–16, Berger served as Director of 80WSE Gallery at NYU, where he mounted a wide range of collaborative 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 an associate professor in the Department of Art and Art Professions at New York University.

A writer and an interlocutor, Thomas J. Lax is currently preparing the exhibition Just Above Midtown: 1974 to the Present with Linda Goode Bryant, scheduled for 2022. He was the inaugural recipient of the Cisneros Research Grant, traveling to Brazil in 2020 to research contemporary Black art. He worked with colleagues across The Museum of Modern Art on a major rehang of the collection in 2019 and coorganized the exhibition Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done in 2018 with Ana Janevski and Martha Joseph. He has organized other projects at MoMA including Unfinished Conversations, Maria Hassabi: PLASTIC, Neil Beloufa: The Colonies and Steffani Jemison: Promise Machine. Previously, he worked at the Studio Museum in Harlem for seven years.