Hear directly from artists about the processes, ideas, and obstacles that inform their work.

For over thirty years Dawoud Bey’s work has been concerned with the making of resonant photographs of peoples within marginalized communities that seek to position those subjects within their own active social space and histories as well as the larger historical conversation about issues of representation. While using the portrait as a site of narrative meaning, individual representation, historical reimagining, and social agency, Bey’s work raises the questions of who is represented or not,and how. His recent video work 9.15.63 creates a visually lush and evocative engagement with history, place, and absence in the context of the tragic history of race relations in America in the South in the 1960s.

Dawoud Bey began his career as a photographer 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 in Atlanta, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

His work is the subject of several monographs and publications. Bey is the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts amongothers.

Dawoud Bey holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University School of Art, and is currently Professor of Art and a Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago, where he has taught since 1998.