Partner Event
Dawoud Bey and Antawan I. Byrd on “Elegy”
Tuesday, April 9
6:00 p.m. CDT
On the occasion of the exhibition and publication of Elegy, artist Dawoud Bey and curator Antawan Byrd will discuss how Bey has reimagined photography’s capacity for considering the Black presence in the American landscape. This public program at the Arts Club of Chicago is free and open to all.
Elegy brings together Bey’s three landscape series to date—Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017); In This Here Place (2021); and Stony the Road (2023)—elucidating the deep historical memory still embedded in the geography of the United States. Bey takes viewers to the historic Richmond Slave Trail in Virginia, where Africans were marched into the initial experience of enslavement; to the plantations of Louisiana, where they labored; and through the landscape of the Underground Railroad in Ohio, where fugitives sought self-emancipation via Lake Erie and Canada. By interweaving these bodies of work into an elegy in three movements, Bey doesn’t merely evoke history; he reimagines it through images that challenge viewers to revisit the landscapes of this country’s troubled past.
Elegy continues at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts through February 25. The catalog for the exhibition was copublished by Aperture and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
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Dawoud Bey is an artist and MacArthur Fellow whose work examines the Black past and present. His photographs and film installations have been exhibited widely in museums and galleries throughout the United States and Europe. His work has been the subject of three major museum retrospectives, most recently Dawoud Bey: An American Project organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. His current exhibition Elegy is on view at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts through February 2024.
Antawan I. Byrd, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Northwestern University and an Associate Curator of Photography and Media at the Art Institute of Chicago. At the Art Institute, he recently curated Closer to the Earth, Closer to My Own Body (2021), a solo exhibition of work by the Kenyan artist Mimi Cherono Ng’ok, and co-edited the catalogue The People Shall Govern! Medu Art Ensemble and the Anti-Apartheid Poster, based on an exhibition that he co-curated in 2019. He co-curated the 2nd Lagos Biennial of Contemporary Art (2019), Kader Attia: Reflecting Memory at Northwestern’s Block Museum of Art (2017), and was an associate curator for the 10th Bamako Encounters, Biennale of African Photography (2015). From 2009 to 2011, he was a Fulbright fellow and curatorial assistant at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos. In 2017, he received the Award for Curatorial Excellence by the Arts Council of the African Studies Association. Byrd is currently co-curating a survey exhibition on Pan-African art and culture, opening at the Art Institute in December 2024 before traveling to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona and the Pompidou, KANAL in Brussels.
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Image: Untitled (Trail and Trees), 2022, Dawoud Bey (American, born 1953), gelatin-silver print, 48 x 59 in., Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of Mrs. Alfred duPont, by exchange, 2020.168.1. Image © Dawoud Bey
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