Lerner was previously Master Teacher for Modern and Contemporary Art at the Denver Art Museum from 2001 to 2003. Prior to his arrival in Colorado, Lerner served as Curator of the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, where he curated several exhibitions, including new projects with Christian Marclay and Dennis Adams, and was the originating curator for the film installation Baltimore by Isaac Julien.
Museum Public Programming
Lerner is known for a to museum programming that combines elements of curatorial and educational practice. Lerner’s approach is best exemplified by a program that he developed at The Lab at Belmar in 2004 , which brings together randomly paired topics in the same night. In 2009, he brought the popular program to the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, where it is produced by Sarah Kate Baie, the museum’s Director of Programing and Chief of Fictions, and presented weekly in the summer and winter seasons. Lerner has also presented Mixed Taste at public events and conferences hosted by the , , in Long Island City, the , and the . Lerner and Baie also worked with artist Melanie Smith and Rafael Ortega to develop a version of Mixed Taste called for the Sala de Arte Público Siqueros, Mexico City. 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.” This style has precursors in the Dada art movement and is often compared with Cabinet Magazine and , in Los Angeles.
Exhibitions
For MCA Denver, Lerner co-curated the major group exhibition West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965–1977, traveling to the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, at the University of Oregon, Eugene, and Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, California. To accompany the exhibition, the curators co-edited a major publication, published by the University of Minnesota Press. Lerner has also curated for MCA Denver such unconventional exhibitions as , which presented a collection of unauthenticated paintings to explore the meaning of authenticity in art. At The Lab at Belmar, Lerner curated solo exhibitions of Liam Gillick and Issac Julien as well as such non-traditional exhibitions as The Astounding Problem of Andrew Novick, featuring the obsessive collections of a former punk rock singer turned electrical engineer. At the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, Lerner curated several exhibitions, including new projects with Christian Marclay and Dennis Adams, and was the originating curator for the film installation Baltimore by Isaac Julien.
Recognition
Nina Simon, one of the leading voices of museum reform in the United States, wrote in her blog, , that under Lerner’s leadership MCA Denver “is a small, focused fount of creative expression and ingenuity." Lerner innovative work at The Lab at Belmar was the subject of an extensive discussion in the Canadian national bestseller The Geography of Hope: A Tour of the World We Need, where Chris Turner wrote that “Lerner assembled the funkiest, most playful, most inviting arts and culture program suburbia had ever seen.”
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, 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.
