Media
By Robin Pogrebin
Originally published in the New York Times
In the fall of 2020, the arts patron Allison Berg listened to the book “From Generosity to Justice: A New Gospel of Wealth” by the Ford Foundation president Darren Walker. She had what she called a lightbulb moment, “hearing Darren speak to the difference between band-aiding a problem and actually taking action to influence systemic change toward equity and justice.”
Berg, who serves on the board of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and collects art by the likes of Louise Bourgeois and Rashid Johnson, had been seeking to give her philanthropy greater focus and to make a more meaningful impact. So, with her husband, Larry, a managing owner of the Los Angeles Football Club and private equity investor, she established the A&L Berg Foundation with a fellowship to help emerging visual arts curators, educators and administrators from underrepresented groups learn to navigate the insular, often elitist, largely white world of visual arts.
“I’ve spoken with these young people and that is how a lot of them see it: as a vast space of whiteness, where they have no one to speak with about their concerns and their experiences,” Berg said in an interview. “They don’t feel like safe spaces.”
The annual fellowship — funded in perpetuity — gives six arts professionals a $10,000 grant each, along with mentoring and workshops culminating in an all-expenses-paid visit to a major arts event, like the Venice Biennale, where the first group attended the V.I.P. preview earlier this year.
In addition, the fellows are given a year of support from Verge, a recruiting and human resources firm, which offers professional guidance, like improving LinkedIn accounts and résumés.
“It isn’t focused on discussing the art or teaching anybody how to be a curator,” Berg said of the fellowship. “It is about the relationships and the behind-the-scenes that nobody talks about.”
Arts institutions and foundations — such as LACMA, Ford and Mellon — have led the way with efforts to diversify the ranks of museum curators, boards, directors, acquisitions and exhibitions.
Less typical is to see collectors take on that kind of project in the mold of, say, an Agnes Gund, who in 2017 established a criminal justice fund, or an Alice Walton, whose foundation joined an $11 million initiative announced in 2023 to increase racial equity within museum leadership positions.
“I don’t know of other individuals doing what she’s doing,” said Elizabeth W. Easton, the director and co-founder of the Center for Curatorial Leadership in New York, adding that Berg “prepared thoroughly for launching her new program.”
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Berg’s foundation also established an Artist Social Impact Grant to honor artists trying to improve their communities; the first one awarded $100,000 to the artist Lauren Halsey last fall for her community center Summaeverythang, which she is building in South Central Los Angeles.
“This grant is a game changer,” Halsey said. “It provides crucial support for actually building the center, as well as resources that will help guarantee Summaeverythang’s long term success in South Central L.A.”
The fellows program specifically aims to help professionals who are already in the field, to give them the kind of connections that have often been unavailable to those who can’t afford to enter the pipeline that traditionally starts with low-paid museum internships and is often lubricated by who you know.
“She’s providing some of those enhanced skill sets that are not formally offered and inevitably help you do career advancement,” said César García-Alvarez, the executive and artistic director of the Mistake Room, a Los Angeles nonprofit arts organization, who served as the Berg Foundation’s first guest program director, a paid position.
García-Alvarez said that coming from a working class immigrant household, one of the biggest hurdles to his own career was “access to cultural capital.”
“I would get nervous when I was invited to gallery dinners — what do you wear? People would ask, ‘Are you going to Venice?’ They don’t take into consideration that there are curators who can’t afford to do that or are undocumented and can’t travel,” he said. “Nobody seemed to be having the conversations around class. This is a very uncomfortable conversation to have in our field.”
Though both Berg and her executive director, Carolyn Ramo, are white women, Berg has made a point of bringing in mentors of color. And the fellows said Berg’s program is an important model for other people of means, regardless of their race or ethnicity.
“We need to build coalitions and forge alliances,” said Elena Ketelsen González, a fellow who serves as an assistant curator at MoMA PS1 in Queens. “This foundation is a strong example of that.”
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In preparing to start her foundation, Berg said she sought guidance from numerous leaders in the field, namely Thelma Golden, the director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem; Walker of the Ford Foundation; and the artist Rashid Johnson.
The foundation’s advisers include several art world heavyweights including Sandra Jackson-Dumont, the director and chief executive of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art; Christine Y. Kim, the curator-at-large of North American Art at Tate Modern and Franklin Sirmans, the director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami.
In an interview, Sirmans said he was happy “to be a part of something that is trying to not only support efforts in the present but also to have a long-term impact on the field.”
For the fellows, attending the Venice Biennale was particularly meaningful, they said. They were enlisted to help write wall and catalog text (for which they were compensated) and got to meet with Adriano Pedrosa, the first Latin American to be named curator at Venice, the world’s longest-running contemporary art exhibition.
“For someone from the borderlands to be brought to the Venice Biennale — it was a dream I had never even considered,” said Tracy Fenix, a fellow who works for the Public Art Division of the City of Los Angeles. “It opens up portals of potential for other brown, native, Latinx, diasporic people.”
The program also prompted subsequent collaborations. Fenix, for example, recently curated a program at the Clemente Center in New York, where another fellow, Sofía Reeser del Rio, is a curator and associate director of programs. The program at Clemente featured work by Xavier Robles Armas, a fellow who is the events and arts manager at the Latinx Project at New York University, which promotes Latino art, culture and scholarship in the United States.
“We were all there together celebrating each other,” Ketelsen González said, adding that the fellowship helped them “realize we are not each other’s competitors. We can raise each other up, seek advice, speak each other’s names.”
At LACMA, Berg is chairwoman of the museum’s Contemporary Acquisitions group. She also serves on the leadership councils of several institutions, including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Dia Art Foundation and the Pérez.
In 2021, she helped produce a documentary about the art world, “The Art of Making It.”
Michael Govan, LACMA’s director, has encouraged Berg’s efforts. “When we’re talking about diversifying the field more quickly and getting things to be more exciting sooner, it helps to accelerate experience and networking,” he said. “You can’t do enough nurturing of young early career professionals. In our field it tends to take a long time.”
Raised in Philadelphia — her father worked in the music industry — Berg became interested in Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art because that’s what she mostly saw on school field trips to museums.
She earned her bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Rochester and a law degree from the University of Miami School of Law. After briefly practicing union-side labor law and running an internship program for the Fulfillment Fund, a nonprofit organization in Los Angeles, Berg transitioned to writing about arts and culture for various publications.
These days, she is focused on the foundation. The fellowship’s next guest program director is Diane Lima, who was a curator of last year’s São Paulo Biennial, which the next crop of fellows will visit next year. And she continues to educate herself about how best to help make U.S. institutions more inclusive and equitable.
“I want to see diversity in our museums and not-for-profit art spaces,” Berg said. “I want to see more platforms for more artists’ narratives. I want to see our museums truly represent the audiences that are coming in. The people who work in these spaces do not look like that enough yet.
“The more individuals we empower from different backgrounds,” she added, “the more platforms we give to artists to be seen and heard.”
