Dawoud Bey

Dawoud Bey

b. 1953, New York
lives in Chicago

Dawoud Bey began his career as an artist 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. Since then he has become one of the most influential American photographers. Working in both color and balck-and-white, Bey creates intimate portraits of people and places that illuminate individual presence while exploring and creating a historical record. His mid-career survey, Dawoud Bey: Portraits 1975–1995, was curated by Kellie Jones for the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis in 1995; a survey exhibition of his work, Picturing People, opened at the Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago in 2012; and his retrospective Dawoud Bey: An American Project was co-organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum in 2020. His works have also been exhibited at institutions including the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts; Art Institute of Chicago; Brooklyn Museum; Detroit Institute of Arts; Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the National Gallery of Art,Washington DC, and other museums world wide. Dawoud Bey earned his MFA from Yale University School of Art, and is currently Professor of Art and a former Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago. 

Dawoud Bey, Night Coming Tenderly, Black, 2017. Installation view at St. John’s Church. Commissioned by FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art. Courtesy of the artist.