Avis Berman: Becoming Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein lecture by Avis Berman. Book signing for the biography Becoming Roy Lichtenstein follows the lecture.

Saturday, January 17, 2027

3 – 4 pm

An independent writer and art historian, Avis Berman has written on painting, sculpture, photography, design, and museum history. She is the author of Rebels on Eighth Street: Juliana Force and the Whitney Museum of American Art; James McNeill Whistler; and Edward Hopper’s New York; and co-author and editor of Katharine Kuh’s memoir My Love Affair with Modern Art: Behind the Scenes with a Legendary Curator. Roy Lichtenstein: The Impossible Collection was published in May 2019.

Her articles and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times, New York Review of Books, ARTnews, Smithsonian, Boston Globe, Hartford Courant, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore Sun, Antiques, Architectural Digest, and Art & Antiques, and she has contributed essays to encyclopedias, anthologies, and museum catalogues on the Armory Show, Roy Lichtenstein, John Sloan, Edward Hopper, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Andy Warhol Museum, American folk art, Ellsworth Kelly, Elie Nadelman, Ursula von Rydingsvard, and James McNeill Whistler.

From 2011-2014 Ms. Berman organized and oversaw the first museum survey of William Glackens’s work in nearly fifty years, which traveled to three museums.

Ms. Berman has also sustained a parallel career as an oral historian in the visual arts. To date, she has interviewed over 500 artists, curators, critics, dealers, collectors and other significant figures in the art world for such organizations as the Archives of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Academy of Design, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Andy Warhol Museum. In 2001, she helped establish the oral history program of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation and in 2016 she began working on similar projects for the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation and the Dedalus Foundation.

Main photo: Dennis Hopper

Headshot: Brad Berman