New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Expressing himself
PHOTOGRAPHER DAWOUD BEY SET TO DISCUSS HIS WORK AT NXTHVN
American photographer Dawoud Bey, a MacArthur Fellow recipient, has been capturing and elevating the African American presence through his work since 1975.
“I was a musician before I became a photographer, and I’ve written and published poetry when I was younger, so I always had the need, I suppose, to express myself,” Bey said. “My godmother gave me a camera when I was 15 years old. The following year I went to see an exhibition ‘Harlem On My Mind’ at the Metropolitan Museum, the first visit to a museum I ever made on my own. The experience of seeing photographs of ordinary African Americans on the wall of a museum began to point to what I might do with the camera I had gotten the year before.”
Best known for his street and portrait photography, his work has been exhibited at prestigious institutions around the globe, and on May 6, he will deliver a presentation as part of NXTHVN’s keynote presentation, beginning at 6 p.m. NXTHVN, located in the Dixwell neighborhood of New Haven bills itself as an arts “incubator” and describes itself as “a new national arts model that empowers emerging artists and curators of color through education and access.”
“Dawoud Bey isn’t only a renowned photographer, he’s a professor, so his commitment to arts mentorship goes hand in hand with NXTHVN’s rigorous pedagogy,” said Kalia Brooks, director of programs and exhibitions at NXTHVN. “People have an idea about what art and artists should look like, and Bey’s work and narrative supersede these falsehoods. At its core, NXTHVN’s programmatic events are inspired by our desire to expand opportunities for our community. The same can be said for Bey’s powerful portraits that highlight underrepresented communities and his projects that expand arts access to those same communities.”
During his talk, Bey will speak about the trajectory of his practice and his upcoming works, including “An American Project,” the artist’s first major career retrospective in 25 years.
“My discussion with Kalia Brooks will focus on the history based work that I have made over the past decade, looking at how aspects of the African American past remain visible and relevant in our contemporary moment,” Bey said. “That work begins with ‘The Birmingham Project,’ that commemorates the lives of six young African Americans killed in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963 and goes up to the recent work that I made in Louisiana on and around the landscapes of five different plantations.”
The photographs from “An American Project” were selected by the two co-curators, Corey Keller, who was then at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Elisabeth Sherman, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
“Corey got the idea for the exhibition when my book ‘Dawoud Bey: Seeing Deeply’ was published in 2017,” Bey said. “That book is a retrospective look at my work going back to my earliest photographs from the early 1970s. Corey saw the book and thought it would be great to use that as the basis for shaping an exhibition. She invited Elisabeth to become her co-curator and we had our first meeting at the Whitney Museum in New York to start thinking about how to shape 40 plus years of work into a coherent exhibition.”
The exhibition ultimately reveals the ways Bey thinks about making photographs has changed, even as his work has always remained centered on the larger social world.
“The current work that I am doing brings aspects of American history in relation to African Americans into a conversation about the role that art can play in our lives,” Bey said. “It can call us to remember, and in remembering hopefully make connections between history and our current circumstances. History explains how we got to where we are now. We need to be reminded of that
history in order to realize that things are not “just happening,” and that everything has a history. The continuing abuse of Black bodies in this country has a very long history.”
For more information on Bey’s presentation, visit nxthvn.com or register at eventbrite.com.