Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey is a widely celebrated photographer and educator whose work engages with the Black presence in America, both past and present. Predominantly working in portraiture for the first several decades of his career, more recent projects utilize landscape to open a dialog about intentionally hidden American stories, exploring how places can hold memory.
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The Artist "Dawoud Bey: Elegy" Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Selected Work
Artist News
Solo Exhibition
Dawoud Bey: Elegy
New Orleans Museum of Art
September 26, 2025 – January 4, 2026
Through the interweaving of three photographic series—”Stony the Road “(2023), “In This Here Place” (2019), and “Night Coming Tenderly, Black” (2017)—Bey offers a framework through which to conceptualize the landscapes of Virginia, Louisiana, and Ohio (respectively) not merely as sites of a troubled history, but also as places that still hold the memories of our shared American past. The exhibition also includes two films: “Evergreen” (2019) and “350,000” (2023).
Group Exhibition
Faces in the Crowd: Street Photography
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
October 11, 2025–July 13, 2026
This exhibition, including work by Dawoud Bey among many others, explores the evolving techniques photographers have used to record the human experience as it has played out in populous urban spaces—from Harlem and Los Angeles to Tokyo and Istanbul—over five decades.
Group Exhibition
(Re)Constructing History
SFMOMA
October 4, 2025–May 3, 2026
(Re)Constructing History, an exhibition of works from SFMOMA’s photography collection, reconsiders moments from the history of photography, anchored by Carrie Mae Weems’ major series, Constructing History.
“Family Portrait”
Addison Gallery of American Art
Sep. 2, 2025 to
Jan. 4, 2026
Bringing together photographs from the Addison’s collection, this exhibition reveals how artists have engaged the theme of family over a span of nearly two centuries. Depicting grief and joy, solemnity and humor, intimate tenderness and boisterous energy, these works demonstrate photography’s capacity to capture both the particular and the universal aspects of family experience.
“Evergreen”
Orlando Museum of Art
June 6, 2025 – January 6, 2026
Dawoud Bey’s Evergreen depicts haunting images captured at the Evergreen Plantation of Wallace, Louisiana. Installed across three video channels, the work scans the grounds of the most intact plantation complex still standing in the United States.
Press
ArtForum “Landmines”
Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art
By Seph Rodney
Award
Dawoud Bey elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences
“Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences honors excellence and convenes leaders from every field of human endeavor to examine new ideas, address issues of importance to the nation and the world, and work together ‘to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.'”
Exhibition Catalog
Gallery Exhibitions
Dawoud Bey: 2020 Exhibition
February 1 – March 21, 2020
Dawoud Bey: The Birmingham Project
September 5 – October 19, 2013
Dawoud Bey: 2001 Exhibition
June 7 – July 14, 2001
