Sean Kelly is delighted to announce the exhibition, Dawoud Bey: Stony the Road, the gallery’s third exhibition with the artist. The exhibition will feature the artist’s newest photographic series, Stony the Road, (2023), and his related film, 350,000, (2023) which center on Richmond, Virginia, as the historical terrain where African captives first arrived in the United States and were marched into enslavement.
Commissioned and first exhibited in Elegy, curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 2023, Bey’s Stony the Road series, is an ongoing exploration of the deep connections between African American history, the American landscape, and the traumas embedded in those landscapes. That exhibition brought together all three bodies of work in Bey’s American landscape trilogy—Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017), In This Here Place (2019), and Stony the Road (2023)—for the first time. Aperture and the VMFA published the monograph, Elegy, featuring essays by Valerie Cassel Oliver, LeRonn P. Brooks, Imani Perry, and Christina Sharpe, providing a comprehensive examination of Bey’s landscape-based projects and their profound historical and emotional significance. Elegy will travel to the New Orleans Museum of Art, where it will open in September 2025
"Bey evokes the ancestors who are present yet unseen. The camera functions as their eyes and their voices, the eyes and voices of the hundreds of thousands who have walked the pathways through bondage and toward freedom. Their presence offers the frequency to which we are now attuned given the charged sites—a trail used by the enslaved, maintained throughout the centuries by their descendants in an effort to honor their sacrifices." - Valerie Cassel Oliver, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Art
Night Coming Tenderly, Black, depicts both real and imagined locations in northeast Ohio tied to the Underground Railroad. Bey’s exploration continues with In This Here Place, which documents the landscapes of plantations in Louisiana. With Stony the Road, Bey turns his lens to the beginning of the African American experience in America: the arrival of enslaved Africans and their first steps on an unfamiliar and unforgiving land.
Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
'Til now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.
- "Lift Every Voice and Sing," James Weldon Johnson
In an intimate, visual dialogue with the past, Bey’s series captures the historical and emotional texture of the Richmond Slave Trail—a well-trodden path of leaves, branches, and waterways that reveal the lingering imprints of the history of enslavement in America. “The ground is still holding its memory and its shape,” describes Bey, emphasizing the spirit and tangible presence of the past. “This is ancestor work. Stepping outside the art context, the project context, this is the work of keeping our ancestors present in the contemporary conversation.”
"The past doesn’t simply stay in the past; it comes with us, right into the present. And there are issues, unresolved issues, embedded in the things that all of these photographs that I’ve made are about." – Dawoud Bey
Central to the photographic series, the exhibition also features the artist’s film 350,000, which recalls the estimated 350,000 men, women, and children sold from Richmond’s auction blocks between 1830 and 1860. Projected on two large, back-to-back screens, the film takes the viewer on a journey along the Richmond Slave Trail, imagining that landscape as if through the eyes of the 350,000 enslaved Africans. Shot in black-and-white by cinematographer Bron Moyi, the film’s visual intensity is amplified by a soundtrack featuring staccato breaths and body percussion, created in collaboration with choreographer and Virginia Commonwealth University Professor E. Gaynell Sherrod. The subtle, rhythmic soundscape, echoes the weight of the journey, resulting in a psychologically poignant sonic landscape that resonates with the sense of history and memory.
"What is the sound of 350,000 pairs of feet walking? What is the sound of 350,000 pairs of lungs breathing? How do these feet and these lungs change the air and the soil? What did those Africans bring with them? Just like residence time in water–soil holds memory and a counter-memory." – Christina Sharpe, Writer
Together, Bey’s film and photographic works offer a reflection into the psychic and physical landscapes of enslavement in America, and the enduring legacies these sites hold within the American consciousness and social fabric. Through this work, Bey contributes essential Black perspectives and experiences into contemporary discourse about landscape. Bey’s ability to re-envision key historical sites through photography and film offers viewers space for reflection and remembrance.
Dawoud Bey: Elegy
Published by Aperture Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond
Elegy brings together Bey’s three landscape series to date—Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017); In This Here Place (2021); and Stony 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.
$65.00
Groundbreaking artist and MacArthur Fellow Dawoud Bey examines the Black past and present. His photographs and film installations have been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the United States and Europe. Bey’s work has been the subject of numerous solo museum exhibitions, including Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits (2024-2025) at the Denver Art Museum, Dawoud Bey: An American Project organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2020-2022), and Elegy at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (2023-2024) and New Orleans Museum of Art (2026). He has been the subject of several monographs, including Elegy (Aperture/VMFA, 2023), which chronicles Bey’s history projects and landscape-based work. Bey is the recipient of numerous awards including five honorary doctorates, and in 2024, the artist was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His forthcoming solo exhibition, Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits, opens at the Denver Art Museum in November 2024.
Bey lives and works in Chicago and New York. He is currently a Critic at Yale University, where he received his Masters in Fine Arts, and is Professor Emeritus at Columbia College, Chicago.
Installation view of Dawoud Bey: Stony the Road at Sean Kelly, New York, January 10 – February 22, 2025, Photography: Adam Reich, Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles
Installation view of Dawoud Bey: Stony the Road at Sean Kelly, New York, January 10 – February 22, 2025, Photography: Adam Reich, Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles
Installation view of Dawoud Bey: Stony the Road at Sean Kelly, New York, January 10 – February 22, 2025, Photography: Adam Reich, Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles
Installation view of Dawoud Bey: Stony the Road at Sean Kelly, New York, January 10 – February 22, 2025, Photography: Adam Reich, Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles
Installation view of Dawoud Bey: Stony the Road at Sean Kelly, New York, January 10 – February 22, 2025, Photography: Adam Reich, Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles
Installation view of Dawoud Bey: Stony the Road at Sean Kelly, New York, January 10 – February 22, 2025, Photography: Adam Reich, Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles
Installation view of Dawoud Bey: Stony the Road at Sean Kelly, New York, January 10 – February 22, 2025, Photography: Adam Reich, Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles
Installation view of Dawoud Bey: Stony the Road at Sean Kelly, New York, January 10 – February 22, 2025, Photography: Adam Reich, Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles
Installation view of Dawoud Bey: Stony the Road at Sean Kelly, New York, January 10 – February 22, 2025, Photography: Adam Reich, Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles
