Sean Kelly is delighted to announce Dawoud Bey: Pictures 1976 – 2019, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. Surveying five decades of work through the lens of five iconic series—Harlem, U.S.A. (1975-1979), Street Portraits (1988-1991), Harlem Redux (2014–2017), Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017), and In This Here Place (2019)—this presentation illuminates Bey’s foundational importance to the development of photography as fine art, historical documentation, and social practice in the United States. The exhibition coincides with Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue, on view at the Getty, April 4–July 9, 2023.

"It seemed to me that no matter what the day, every day was Saturday in Harlem." - Dawoud Bey

"I wanted to give the Black subjects in the photographs... a space that would amplify their presence and direct their gaze out into the world." - Dawoud Bey

"Looking at the earlier Harlem photographs, I am acutely aware that Harlem itself is a very different place, and that I am—after 40 years of making photographs—a very different person and a very different kind of photographer." - Dawoud Bey

"...that's really what this project is about, making the invisible visible in the photogrpahs, in a way that is palpable and in a way that resonates." - Dawoud Bey

Dawoud Bey will be the subject of an exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, opening in 2023, entitled Elegy, that brings together his three most recent history and landscape-based projects, Night Coming Tenderly, Black, In This Here Place, and a new group of work, Stony the Road, along with a new video work 350,000.

Dawoud Bey holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University School of Art. In 2017 Bey was awarded the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship. He is also the recipient of fellowships from United States Artists, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, amongst other honors. In 2020, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art opened a major retrospective exhibition of Bey’s work that traveled to the High Museum of Art, Atlanta and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. To celebrate the exhibitions, Yale University Press and SFMOMA published Dawoud Bey: Two American Projects. Bey’s work is featured in numerous publications, and is the subject of several monographs and publications, including Class Pictures (Aperture, 2007), Harlem, U.S.A. (Yale University Press, 2012), Picturing People (Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 2012), and Dawoud Bey: The Birmingham Project (Birmingham Museum of Art, 2013). In 2018 a major forty-year retrospective publication, Dawoud Bey: Seeing Deeply, was published by the University of Texas. His 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 many other museums worldwide.

For press inquiries, please contact Adair Lentini at Adair@skny.com

For all other inquiries, please contact Thomas Kelly at Thomas@seankellyla.com, Courtney Treut at Courtney@seankellyla.com or Lauren Kelly at Lauren@skny.com