The Whitney Presents Dawoud Bey: An American Project

Created from 1975 to 1979, Bey’s first series, Harlem U.S.A. presents complex, intimate depictions of the neighborhood’s residents situated within the surrounding cityscape. Born and raised in Queens, Bey was drawn to Harlem both as the site of his parent’s meeting and home to many friends and family as well as a symbol of and wellspring for Black American culture. Described by the artist as a sort of homecoming, the series debuted at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. Bey revisits the neighborhood nearly forty years later in his series Harlem Redux, a wistful and elegiac look at the community’s recent, rapid transformation and gentrification. Made from 2014-2017 using a new medium format camera, these larger color photographs address the neighborhood’s shifting topography, population, and daily rhythms.

Harlem U.S.A was made with a 35mm camera and wide-angle lens, and Bey continued to use that same camera for much of the 1980s. During his 1985 residency at Light Work in Syracuse, NY, Bey continued to push the possibilities of this format, exploring new ways to make use of shadow and light to help define a dynamic composition.

In 1988, Bey began working with a larger, and more conspicuous, tripod-mounted 4-x-5-inch format camera. Seeking a more equitable, reciprocal relationship with his sitters, Bey approached his subjects openly, creating a series of more formal “street portraits” in areas such as Brooklyn and Washington, DC. By using Polaroid Type-55 film, Bey was able to produce instant pictures that he gave to the sitters, as well as negatives that he later used to make large-scale prints.

In 1991, Bey transitioned to the studio and began using the 20-x-24-inch Polaroid View Camera to capture his subjects. While cumbersome in size, the camera allowed for sustained engagement with his sitters and the ability to orchestrate all aspects of the image. With this new format, Bey made a series of portraits first of his artist friends and later youth whom he met through residencies at high schools and museums around the country. As the project evolved, Bey also experimented with multi-panel Polaroid portraiture, creating a series of large-scale works that render his subjects using several individual frames. In Class Pictures (2001-2006), Bey began making large-scale color portraits of high school students during a residency at the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago. Each portrait is accompanied by text that he invited the students to contribute furthering his interest in creating more collaborative relationships with his sitters. Bey expanded the series during residencies around the country from 2003 to 2006.

The most recent series included in the exhibition, The Birmingham Project (2012) and Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017), urgently address African American history through expressive portraits and evocative landscapes. In 2012, Bey made a series of portraits commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, and its violent aftermath. The series of diptychs pairs portraits of children the same ages as the victims with adults fifty years older- -the ages the victims would have been had they lived. Bey made the portraits in the Bethel Baptist Church, an early headquarters for the civil rights movement in Birmingham, and in the Birmingham Museum of Art. Also on display is Bey’s split-screen video titled 9.15.63 (2012), which corresponds to the date of the 1963 church bombing and was shot in locations across Birmingham. Shown together, these powerful projects honor the tragic loss of the six children and make plain the continued impact of violence, trauma, and racism.

Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017) imagines the flight of enslaved Black Americans along the leg of the Underground Railroad that operated in Northeastern Ohio. Marking Bey’s first complete departure from figuration, these landscapes reimagine the experience of the journey by fugitive African Americans and the topography and buildings that may have provided shelter and protection along the way leading to Lake Erie and freedom in Canada.

Dawoud Bey was born in New York City in 1953 and began his career as a photographer in 1975. Since his first solo exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979, his work has been featured in exhibitions at numerous institutions worldwide including the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Fogg Museum, Harvard University; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP), Chicago; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, among many others. Bey’s photographs are represented in collections around the globe, and his critical writings on photography and art have appeared in numerous publications and exhibition catalogs. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Bey received the prestigious MacArthur “Genius” fellowship in 2017. He holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University, and is currently professor of art and a former distinguished college artist at Columbia College Chicago, where he has taught since 1998.

Institutional and Curatorial Credits
Dawoud Bey: An American Project is co-organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. It is curated by Corey Keller, curator of photography at SFMOMA, and Elisabeth Sherman, assistant curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

The exhibition premiered at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from February 15 to October 12, 2020. An American Project is currently on view at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta through March 14, 2021 before its New York debut at the Whitney from April 17 to October 3, 2021. It will then travel to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston where it will be on view from March 6 to May 30, 2022.