Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey (b. 1953) is a groundbreaking American artist and MacArthur Fellow whose work examines the Black past and present. His photographs and film installations engage the oft disappeared histories of the Black presence in America. Bey began his career as a photographer in 1975 with a series of photographs, “Harlem, U.S.A,,” 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 major museum and gallery exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe, with works held in numerous public collections.
Recent solo museum exhibitions include Street Portraits at the Denver Art Museum (November 2024), the first standalone museum show dedicated to this iconic series. Elegy (2023–2024), an exhibition of the artist’s history-based photographs and film works, debuted at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and will travel to the New Orleans Museum of Art later this year. Dawoud Bey: An American Project (2020–2022), organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, toured to the High Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Additionally, his work was featured in the two-person exhibition Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue, organized by the Grand Rapids Art Museum, which traveled to the Seattle Art Museum, Tampa Museum of Art, and The Getty Center.
Bey’s work has been the subject of several monographs, including Elegy (Aperture/VMFA, 2023), a major publication documenting his landscape retrospective at VMFA, a forty-year retrospective monograph Seeing Deeply (University of Texas Press, 2017), and the recent Street Portraits (MACK Books, 2021). He is a recipient of many awards and distinctions, including recognition by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2024), the College Art Association (2023), the ICP Infinity Award (2019), a Lifetime Achievement Award from Howard University (2017), the United States Artists Fellowship (2015), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2002), and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1991), among many other honors. He has been the recipient of four honorary doctorate degrees.