Dawoud Bey: An American Project
Until 3 October at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort St, Manhattan
The US photographer Dawoud Bey has been preoccupied with conveying and documenting the history of the African American experience for more than four decades. This travelling retrospective begins with the artist’s first series of street photography in Harlem in 1975 and ends with his 2017 nocturnal landscapes called
Night Coming Tenderly Black, where he set out to visualise the path of fugitive slaves escaping under the cover of darkness to freedom on the Underground Railroad in Ohio. Among the highlights, Bey’s
Class Pictures series (2001-2006) features colour portraits of high school students taken during various artist residencies at different museums around the country. His mission, in part, has for many years been to facilitate accessibility. “It’s a way of getting the museum as an institution to engage in an expanded conversation and to reconsider just what a museum is,” Bey says. “It’s up to artists to help museums reinvent themselves.”