Dawoud Bey Two American Projects Corey Keller, Elisabeth Sherman, Torkwase Dyson, Steven Nelson, Imani Perry, Claudia Rankine

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Format:: Hardback
Publication date:: 18 Feb 2020
ISBN:: 9780300248500
Imprint:: Yale University Press
Dimensions:: 128 pages: 254 x 229mm
Illustrations:: 85 color and b-w illus.
Sales territories:: World

Categories:

Arts »
Photography & Photographs »

Dawoud Bey (b. 1953) is an American photographer best known for his large-scale portraits of underrepresented subjects and his commitment to fostering dialogue about contemporary social and political topics. Bey has also found inspiration in the past, and in two recent series, presented together here for the first time, he addresses African American history explicitly, with renderings both lyrical and immediate. In 2012 Bey created The Birmingham Project, a series of paired portraits memorializing the six children who were victims of the Ku Klux Klan’s bombing of Birmingham, Alabama’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, a site of mass civil rights meetings, and the violent aftermath. Night Coming Tenderly, Black is a group of large-scale black-and-white landscapes made in 2017 in Ohio that reimagine sites where the Underground Railroad once operated. The book is introduced by an essay exploring the series’ place within Bey’s wider body of work, as well as their relationships to the past, the present, and each other. Additional essays investigate the works’ evocations of race, history, time, and place, addressing the particularities of and resonances between two series of photographs that powerfully reimagine the past into the present.

Corey Keller is curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Elisabeth Sherman is assistant curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
(February–June 2020)

High Museum of Art, Atlanta
(July–October 2020)

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
(November 2020–February 2021)