Dawoud Bey
Photographer
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. He has since had numerous exhibitions worldwide, at such institutions as the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and other museums worldwide. His works are included in the permanent collections of over 50 museums throughout the United States and Europe. In 2020, his work will be the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He is a recipient of a 2017 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur “genius grant”; a United States Artists fellow; and the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lucie Foundation, among other honors. Bey holds a master of fine arts degree from Yale University School of Art and is currently Professor of Art and a former Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago, where he has taught since 1998.
Dawoud Bey’s photographs and process have been described as a “civic act of seeing”. He says his photographs of marginalized people and histories are all a way of giving these subjects greater value than they are traditionally given.