Dawoud Bey: Elegy

Dawoud Bey focuses on the landscape to create a portrait of the early African American presence in the United States. Renowned for his Harlem street scenes and expressive portraits, Dawoud Bey continues his ongoing series on African American history. Elegy brings together Bey’s three landscape series to date—Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017); In This Here Place (2021); and Stoney the Road (2023)—elucidating the deep historical memory still embedded in the geography of the United States. Bey takes viewers to the historic Richmond Slave Trail in Virginia, where Africans were marched onto auction blocks; to the plantations of Louisiana, where they labored; and along the last stages of the Underground Railroad in Ohio, where fugitives sought self-emancipation. Essays by the exhibition’s curator, Valerie Cassel Oliver, and scholars LeRonn P. Brooks, Imani Perry, and Christina Sharpe illuminate the work. By interweaving these bodies of work into an elegy in three movements, Bey doesn’t merely evoke history, he retells it through historically grounded images that challenge viewers to go beyond seeing and imagine lived experiences. Copublished by Aperture and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond.

Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 176
Number of images: 75
Publication date: 2023-12-12
Measurements: 11.5 x 12 x 1 inches
ISBN: 9781597115643

Exhibition Schedule:
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, November 18, 2023—February 25, 2024

Dawoud Bey (born in New York, 1953) has for decades made groundbreaking and evocative work about the histories of Black communities. His numerous honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. A major career retrospective of his work, An American Project, was co-organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2020–22). Bey holds a master of fine arts degree from Yale University School of Art and is currently professor of art and a former Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago, where he has taught since 1998. His books include Class Pictures (Aperture, 2007), Seeing Deeply (2018), Dawoud Bey on Photographing People and Communities (Aperture, 2019),and Street Portraits (2021).

Valerie Cassel Oliver is curator of modern and contemporary art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond.

LeRonn P. Brooks is associate curator for modern and contemporary collections at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. His writings coalesce around themes of self-emancipation, the eventual liberation from bondage, and the invisible narratives of Black fragility.

Imani Perry is Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and a faculty associate with the programs in law and public affairs, gender and sexuality studies, and jazz studies. Her most recent book South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation continues her thoughtful meditation on the legacies of this country.

Christina Sharpe is a writer, professor, and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black studies in the humanities at York University. Her writings are compelling meditations on the sociopolitical structures that have developed in the United States over its long and contentious history.