Sold Out
Presented by: Dawoud Bey and Brian Piper
Filmmaker: Bron Moyi (not present)
December 11, 2021
Lecture: 2:00 pm
Reception at THNOC: 3:30-5:00 pm
Admission: Free
Beginning with The Birmingham Project photographs and the video work 9.15.63 (2012), which pay homage to the six young African Americans killed on September 15, 1963, in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church and its violent aftermath, Dawoud Bey has made an imaginative and resonant engagement with aspects of African American history the subject of his work. Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017) reimagined the path of fugitivity along the Underground Railroad in Northeastern Ohio by formerly enslaved African Americans, and In This Here Place (2019) and the three- channel video Evergreen (2021) look at the landscape of slavery in Louisiana along the west bank of the Mississippi River. In each of these bodies of work Bey seeks to place African American history at the center of the American historical narrative.
The Historic New Orleans Collection is hosting a reception immediately following the lecture in the Tricentennial Wing at 520 Royal Street in the French Quarter. Bey’s exhibition, “In This Here Place,” will be open for viewing. In the exhibit, Bey visits Louisiana plantation landscapes that were witness to slavery-era violence. The work includes large-format black-and- white photographs and “Evergreen,” a multimedia installation accompanied by music performed by Imani Uzari. Hors d’oeuvres and refreshments will be served.
Dawoud Bey – Photographer
Celebrated American artist, photographer, and MacArthur Fellow Dawoud Bey began his career in 1975 with a series of photographs, Harlem, USA, that were later exhibited in his first one-person exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. He has since had numerous exhibitions worldwide, at such institutions as the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and other museums worldwide. His works are included in the permanent collections of over fifty museums throughout the United States and Europe. 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 museums in the US.
Bey’s work is included in numerous publications and is the subject of several monographs, including Class Pictures (Aperture, 2007), Harlem, USA (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 Press. Dawoud Bey: Two American Projects was published by Yale University Press in 2020, and Street Portraits was published in 2021 by Mack Books, London.
Dawoud 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.
Brian Piper – Curator
Bron Moyi – Filmmaker
Bron Moyi is an award-winning cinematographer. He has shot a variety of projects, including music videos and commercials, narrative feature films, and narrative and documentary shorts that have screened at various films festivals around the country. Moyi is known for his work on Time (2020), The Trees Remember (2021) and Jon Batiste’s – FREEDOM (2021). He recently completed Dawoud Bey: The Landscape of Slavery (2021).
Sponsors: The Jules L. Cahn Family
Image: Dawoud Bey – Irrigation Ditch, 2019
