Dawoud Bey : two American projects / Corey Keller and Elisabeth Sherman ; with contributions from Torkwase Dyson, Steven Nelson, Imani Perry, Claudia Rankine.
Catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition Dawoud Bay: an American project held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, February 15-May 15, 2020; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, June 27-October 18, 2020; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, November 20, 2020-April 4, 2021. Includes bibliographical references.
Contents:
Directors' forewords / Neal Benezra and Adam D. Weinberg -- Now is the time / Corey Keller and Elisabeth Sherman -- Dawoud Bey's historical turn / Steven Nelson -- Plates: Night coming tenderly, black -- To fling my arms wide on: On Night coming tenderly, Black / Claudia Rankine -- Black compositional thought: black hauntology, plantationocene, and paradoxical form / Torkwase Dyson -- Plates: The Birmingham project -- Familiar grace / Imani Perry.
Summary:
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.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.