Lerner co-curated (with Elissa Auther) 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 Orphan Paintings: Unauthenticated Art of the Russian Avant-Garde, 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, Museum 2.0, 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 (Random House Canada, 2007), 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 (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. Books Mark Mothersbaugh: Myopia, Princeton Architectural Press, 2014. () From Russia With Doubt,