Groundbreaking American artist and MacArthur Fellow Dawoud Bey 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 Elegy (2023-2024), an exhibition of the artist’s history-based photographs and film works at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts which travels to the New Orleans Museum of Art later this year; and Dawoud Bey: An American Project (2020-2022), which was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and traveled to the High Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. His work was also recently the subject of the two-person exhibition Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue organized by the Grand Rapids Museum of Art that traveled to the Seattle Art Museum, Tampa Museum of Art, and The Getty Center. Opening in November 2024 at the Denver Art Museum, Dawoud Bey will present the solo exhibition, Street Portraits, the first standalone museum show to explore the iconic series.

Bey’s conceptual and material evolution is, in part, a desire to find other ways of making his work within the context of his community and museum-based projects. Bey has pioneered programs that redefine how artists engage with institutions, while striving to make those spaces more accessible to the communities they serve. Class Pictures (2002-2006) expands upon a series of portraits the artist first created during a residency in 1992 at the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Andover. In this series Bey collaborated with young people and institutions throughout the United States. These striking, large-scale color portraits of students depict teenagers from a range of economic, social, and ethnic backgrounds, creating a diverse collection of portraits of a generation that challenge teenage stereotypes.

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). His critical writings on contemporary art and photography have appeared in a range of publications, including recent monograph essays on artists Jordan Casteel and Deborah Roberts.

He is a Critic and alumnus at Yale University and is Professor Emeritus at Columbia College, Chicago. In addition to his MacArthur Fellowship, Bey 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.

Dawoud Bey’s work has been included in important solo and group exhibitions worldwide and is included in the permanent collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, the High Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Tate Modern, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and other museums internationally.