Einstein Visiting Artist Lecture Series: Dawoud Bey

History and Memory in the Landscape: A Conversation with Dawoud Bey & Colette Veasey-Cullors | Einstein Visiting Artist Lecture Series

Join Dawoud Bey and Otis College provost Colette Veasey-Cullors for an engaging talk centered around Dawoud Bey’s construction of history and memory and his necessity to provoke a visual conversation about the past in the present moment. They will discuss how Bey uses the photographic medium as a “piece of the American fabric that is not always engaged or amplified in the Great American narrative;” a reimagining of history that centers and magnifies those unseen narratives and subjects while simultaneously engaging with the history of photography.

About Dawoud Bey:

Groundbreaking artist and MacArthur Fellow Dawoud Bey examines the Black past and present. His photographs and film installations have been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the United States and Europe. Bey’s work has been the subject of numerous solo museum exhibitions, including Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits (2024-2025) at the Denver Art Museum, Dawoud Bey: An American Project organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2020-2022), and Elegy at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (2023-2024) and New Orleans Museum of Art (2026). He has been the subject of several monographs, including Elegy (Aperture/VMFA, 2023), which chronicles Bey's history projects and landscape-based work. Bey is the recipient of numerous awards including five honorary doctorates, and in 2024, the artist was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His forthcoming solo exhibition, Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits, opens at the Denver Art Museum in November 2024. Bey lives and works in Chicago and New York. He is currently a Critic at Yale University, where he received his Masters in Fine Arts, and is Professor Emeritus at Columbia College, Chicago.

Host or Publisher Otis College of Art and Design