Looking through the Lens of American History

Join us for a conversation about the role contemporary photography has played in addressing our nation’s history with artists Dawoud Bey and Ming Smith, author Jon Meacham, and moderator Eric Motley, Deputy Director at the National Gallery of Art. The presenters will explore how you can create photographs and construct narratives that speak to history.

Did you know that Dawoud originally wanted to be a musician, but he was given his late godfather’s 35-millimeter camera and eventually changed his mind!

Dawoud Bey, based in Chicago, was born in 1953 in Queens, New York. Celebrated for his rich, psychologically compelling portraits, Bey explores in his work a range of formal and material methodologies to create images and projects that connect deeply with the communities he photographs.

Bey came to attention with Harlem, U.S.A. (1975–1979) a visual journey through the iconic neighborhood that, in 1979, also comprised his first solo exhibition at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Since then, Bey’s photographic and social practice—he is highly regarded as an educator as well as a photographer—has been defined by the empathy he brings to his subjects and the complexity with which he depicts them. In succeeding decades and successive bodies of work, Bey has moved from working “in the streets” with a small, hand-held 35mm camera to creating more formally structured portraits using a tripod mounted 4 x 5 camera and the monumental 20 x 24 Polaroid view camera.

Bey’s conceptual and material evolution is, in part, a desire to find other ways of making his work within the context of his community and museum-based projects. Bey has pioneered programs that redefine how artists engage with institutions, while striving to make those spaces more accessible to the communities they serve.

Recent bodies of work focus on the construction of history and memory. The Birmingham Project (2013) memorializes the lives of six young African American children killed in the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama and its aftermath; for Harlem Redux (2014–2017), Bey revisited the neighborhood to witness an urban landscape dramatically transformed by gentrification; and in Night Coming Tenderly, Black, 2017 Bey focused on architecture and landscape to visualize the historical subject of the Underground Railroad. Bey continues his visualization of collective experience and history, using photography as a vehicle to make them resonant in the contemporary moment.

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. In 2017, Bey was awarded the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship. He is also the recipient of fellowships from United States Artists, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, amongst other honors.

Dawoud Bey’s work has been featured in important solo and group exhibitions worldwide, such as “Dawoud Bey: The Birmingham Project” (National Gallery of Art, 2019). His photographs are included in the permanent collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, the High Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the National Gallery of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Tate Modern, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and other museums internationally.

The Sharon Percy Rockefeller Panel Series is held each year during FAPE’s Annual Events in Washington, D.C. It recognizes Sharon for her extraordinary commitment to the arts, the National Gallery of Art and FAPE. Agnes Gund is the generous sponsor of this annual talk.