Dawoud Bey

Dawoud Bey, Critic in Photography
Webpage: https://www.instagram.com/dawoudbey

MacArthur Fellow Dawoud Bey has been a groundbreaking American artist, making evocative photographs and film works about those communities that are often marginalized, and visualizing the oft disappeared histories of the Black presence in America. He began his career as a photographer in 1975 with a series of photographs, “Harlem, USA,” that were exhibited to critical acclaim in his first one-person exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. His work has since been the subject of numerous exhibitions and retrospectives at museums and galleries worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the High Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. His most recent retrospective exhibition Dawoud Bey: An American Project, organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, opened at those institutions, and traveled to the High Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. His work was recenttly the subject of the exhibition Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue organized by the Grand Rapids Museum of Art that traveled to the Seattle Art Museu, Tampa Museum of Art, and The Getty Center. His work has been the subject of several monographs, including a forty-year retrospective monograph Seeing Deeply (University of Texas Press, 2017), and the recent Street Portraits (MACK Books, 2021). His critical writings on contemporary art and photography have appeared in a range of publications. A major publication Elegy, just released, brings together the history projects and landscape-based work Bey has made since 2012 and accompanies an exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts on view through February 2024. In addition to the MacArthur Fellowship, Bey is a recipient of the United States Artist Award, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the ICP Infinity Award, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Howard University among many other honors. He has been the recipient of four honorary doctorate degrees. Dawoud Bey has a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University School of Art, and is Emeritus Professor of Photography and a former Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago. He is represented by Sean Kelly Gallery, NY and LA, Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago, and Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco. https://www.skny.com/artists/dawoud-bey