Adam Lerner

Adam Lerner has been the Executive Director of The Laboratory of Art and Ideas at Belmar (The Lab at Belmar) since May 2004, as well as Affiliate Curator for Experimental Programs at the Denver Art Museum.

Career

Lerner was previously Master Teacher for Modern and Contemporary Art at the Denver Art Museum from 2001 to 2003. While at the Denver Art Museum, Lerner worked with Director Lewis Sharp and Continuum Partners to conceptualize and create a new contemporary cultural space for the Denver community. These discussions were the impetus for The Lab at Belmar.

Lerner held a leadership role while at the Denver Art Museum, co-chairing a staff committee to revise exhibition policy and participating on a committee to incorporate new technology into the museum. He was charged with overseeing and developing the relationship between the museum and regional departments of art and art history. He co-organized the Denver presentation of a Pierre Bonnard exhibition in 2003, in collaboration with the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. Prior to his arrival in Colorado, Lerner served as Curator of the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, where he also curated several exhibitions, including new projects with Christian Marclay, Dennis Adams, and Isaac Julien.

Academic Focus

Since the early 1990s, Lerner’s scholarship has focused on the relationship between art and public life. Lerner co-edited the book "Reimagining the Nation," published by Open University Press (1993), including his own essay on nineteenth-century sculpture and French nationalism. He wrote his dissertation on early twentieth-century American monuments, emphasizing the career of Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore. His contribution to the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s 2002-03 biennial exhibition catalogue “The Museum and the Multiplex” was the subject of a symposium of the same name at the Corcoran in spring 2003.

Education

Lerner received his Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University and his Master's from Cambridge University. He was a Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum from 1997 to 1998.

Contributions

At The Lab, Lerner developed a unique approach to presenting cultural content that combines expertise with humor and chance. In an article on Lerner in Surface Magazine, Aric Chen described one of his public events as follows: “A collision of highbrow and low, it presents odd-couple, head-to-head pairings between, say, a tequila connoisseur and an expert on dark energy in the Universe that tease out disparate approaches to knowledge with geeky brilliance.” [Aric Chen, “Adam Lerner,” Surface 68, November 2007, pp. 144-5.] This style has been characterized as “intellectual whimsy,” an approach which has precursors in the Dada art movement and is currently associated with Cabinet Magazine and the McSweeney’s group of publications, including The Believer. [Charlotte Taylor, “The Importance of Being Earnest,” Frieze 92 (June-August) 2005. http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/the_importance_of_being_earnest] The Lab’s audience has been described as “McSweeney’s-loving Denverati.” [“Denver: Verdant Eden of Diversion” http://gridskipper.com/58009/denver-verdant-eden-of-diversion]

References

ee also

*Denver Art Museum