Michael Berman
Artist Michael Berman of San Lorenzo has photographed the desert southwest for over three decades.
Michael Berman
San Lorenzo
2012 Recipient, Individual Artist
Artist Michael Berman of San Lorenzo has photographed the desert southwest for over three decades and captured its dramatic surroundings in compelling landscape prints.
Born in 1956 in New York City, Berman came west to study biology at Colorado College. He later received his masters of fine arts from Arizona State University. Berman has lived for 34 years in San Lorenzo on the edge of the Gila National Forest, the focus of his next book, currently in production at the Museum of New Mexico Press. As part of his commitment to the Gila wilderness, Berman took part in the New Mexico BLM Wilderness Photography Survey in 1996, and became a founding board member of the Gila Resource Information Project in 1997. His landscape photography reflects his strong interest in ecology developed through his early studies, and his images call attention to wild places that are under threat. He donates his time and artwork to conservation organizations, including the Gila Conservation Coalition.
His work is represented in the permanent collections of many museums, including the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas; the Denver Art Museum; the Cleveland Museum of Art; and the Yale University Art Gallery.
In 2008, Berman received a prestigious fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for his work Grasslands: The Chihuahuan Desert Project.