Unless you were already familiar with Bey’s documentary work, the horror he refers to might not be recognizable to you.
Dawoud Bey
Posted inArt
Four Decades of Dawoud Bey
Bey does not simply document Black life, but Black existence in a nation-state built upon the creation and maintenance of our subjugation.
Posted inArt
The Many Afterlives and Expressions of the African Diaspora
To commemorate the 400-year anniversary of the arrival of the first slave ships in the United States, a recent exhibition at the Allen Memorial Art Museum explores Paul Gilroy’s concept of the “Black Atlantic.”
Posted inOpinion
Decolonization: an Act of Independence, Not Benevolence
It’s clear: We need space for new narratives. But how far will we get if the space-making rests in the hands of the colonizers?
Posted inArt
Dawoud Bey Enters the Imaginations of Freedom Seekers
The photography in this show imagines what stations of the Underground Railroad might look like, as the act of escaping enslavement is also essentially an act of imagination.
Posted inArt
Dawoud Bey Photographs the Living to Honor Children Killed in Birmingham in 1963
These portraits are not displayed in memoriam. They’re full of life.
Posted inArt
Back When Painting Was Dead
When Clement Greenberg, Frank Stella, and Donald Judd tried to define what makes a painting, they overlooked a central feature — capaciousness.
Posted inIn Brief
Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Dawoud Bey, and Trevor Paglen Among This Year’s MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grantees
The annual award to given to individuals who have “shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.”
Posted inOpinion
Which Artist Should Create Obama’s Official Presidential Portrait?
In a perfect world, who would be the artist that captures the likeness of Obama for his official portrait?
Posted inArt
At Home in Harlem
The inaugural exhibition at the new Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute is concerned with demonstrating how one comes to belong to a place.
Posted inBooks
The Politics of Seeing, Being, and Visibility in Photography
It doesn’t seem right to call the latest issue of Aperture — its first issue dedicated to African American lives as represented by the medium of photography — a magazine. It is a powerhouse book; it does so much heavy lifting.
Posted inArt
Whitney Biennial 2014: Where Have All the Politics Gone?
The 2014 Whitney Biennial has many things: oversized ceramics, big abstract and figurative paintings, experimental jazz, videos of people having sex, and bead curtains. What it doesn’t have all that much of is politics.