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.

"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.

"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

"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

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.