Dawoud Bey
b. 1953, New York
Lives in Chicago
venue
The Historic New Orleans Collection
Tricentennial Wing, Scovern Gallery
520 Royal St, New Orleans, LA 70130
Monday, Closed
Tuesday–Saturday, 9:30 AM - 4:30 PM
Sunday, 10:30 AM - 4:30 PM
neighborhood
about the project
In This Here Place is a series of landscape photographs made at sites on and around plantations in Louisiana that once held enslaved people. Bey’s landscapes possess a quiet charge, implying that the past still haunts this land, and speak to the traumatic reality of Black life in slave societies. From the bayou that sheltered maroon societies, to cane fields where people labored and died over a product they were seldom given access to, to cabins that offered some semblance of privacy, these places bore silent witness to unthinkable violence, while some offered refuge from it. As Bey’s third body of work about Black history in the United States, In This Here Place looks the furthest into the past.
Bey’s photographs are shown with Evergreen, a three-channel video featuring a vocal soundscape by the vocalist and composer Imani Uzuri. Named for the Evergreen Plantation—one of the most faithfully preserved plantations in the South with a working sugarcane plantation and twenty-two cabins placed far from the main house—Bey’s film, along with Uzuri’s vocals, offer a human presence to the unpopulated spaces pictured in Bey’s images. Together, the photographs and video implore us to search for the presence of a history that we cannot fully see yet the effects of which continue to shape our lives.
About the artist
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 black-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, In This Here Place, 2019. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow. The Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photo: Jose Cotto