Dawoud Bey: Elegy

About Valerie Cassel Oliver

Dawoud Bey (born in New York 1953) has for decades made groundbreaking and evocative work about the histories of Black communities. His numerous honors include a MacArthur Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowship and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. A major career retrospective of his work An American Project was co-organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (202022). Bey holds a master of fine arts degree from Yale University School of Art and is currently professor of art and a former Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago where he has taught since 1998. His books include Class Pictures (Aperture 2007) Seeing Deeply (2018) Dawoud Bey on Photographing People and Communities (Aperture 2019) and Street Portraits (2021). Valerie Cassel is curator of modern and contemporary art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Richmond. LeRonn P. Brooks is associate curator for modern and contemporary collections at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.  Imani Perry is the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor Harvard Radcliffe Institute and Henry A. Morss Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women Gender and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Her most recent book South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation received the National Book Award for nonfiction. Christina Sharpe is a writer professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black studies in the humanities at York University.