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Dawoud Bey: Elegy Weekend Symposium
Sat, September 27th at 1:00 PM - 4:30 PM

Join us for a day celebrating and engaging with the newly opened exhibition Dawoud Bey: Elegy. We are honored to feature this day of discussion in NOMA’s Lapis Center for the Arts with local and visiting artists (including American photographer Dawoud Bey), curators, historians, and activists.
The afternoon’s first panel will feature artist Dawoud Bey; Valerie Cassel Oliver, the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; and LeRonn Brooks, Associate Curator, Modern and Contemporary Collections at the Getty Research Institute, in a conversation around the exhibition and catalogue.
The second panel highlights Kathe Hambrick, Executive of the Director Amistad Research Center and Founder of The River Road African American Museum; Jo Banner and Dr Joy Banner, Co-Founders of The Descendants Project; for a discussion centering the land of Louisiana and, its history, present and future.
The day culminates in a catalogue signing.
This program is free and open to all. Advance registration is recommended.
In order to view the exhibition Dawoud Bey: Elegy, a museum admission ticket is required. Tickets can be purchased at the admissions desk in the Great Hall or online.
Program Details
Dawoud Bey: Elegy Catalogue Contributor Panel | 1:00-2:00pm
Featuring artist Dawoud Bey; Valerie Cassel Oliver, the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; and LeRonn Brooks, Associate Curator, Modern and Contemporary Collections at the Getty Research Institute. Moderated by Brian Piper.
Intermission | 2:00-2:30pm
Panel Discussion | 2:30-3:30pm
Featuring Kathe Hambrick, Director of the Amistad Research Center and Founder of the River Road African American Museum; and Jo Banner and Dr. Joy Banner, founders and directors of the Descendants Project and Woodland Plantation. Moderated by Kristina Kay Robinson.
Dawoud Bey: Elegy exhibition catalogue signing with Bey, Cassel Oliver, and Brooks | 3:30 – 4:15 pm
Cafe NOMA, which is adjacent to the Lapis Center for the Arts, will be open for food and beverage purchases throughout the afternoon
About the Participants
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: 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 (2025-2026); and Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits at the Denver Art Museum (2024-2025). 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.
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.
About Valerie Cassel Oliver

Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Valerie Cassel Oliver
Valerie Cassel Oliver is the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Prior to this role, she served as a senior curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas; director of the Visiting Artist Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and program specialist at the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2000, she was one of six curators selected to organize the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Biennial. Cassel Oliver has organized several special exhibitions at VMFA, including Howardena Pindell: What Remains To Be Seen (2018), Cosmologies from the Tree of Life: Art from the African American South (2019), The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse (2021) and Isaac Julien: Lessons of the Hour—Frederick Douglass (2022). In addition, she has produced an installation series, Lewis Focus, that has featured the work of Theaster Gates, Athena LaTocha, Annabeth Rosen and Ebony Patterson
About LeRonn Brooks

Dr. LeRonn P. Brooks, curator of modern and contemporary collections, and the African American Art History Initiative (AAAHI), at the Getty Research Institute
Dr. LeRonn P. Brooks is an art historian and curator of modern and contemporary collections, and the African American Art History Initiative (AAAHI), at the Getty Research Institute. Brooks is curator of African American collections and acquisitions at the GRI. He is responsible for building and developing collections to promote advanced research in the study of African American art history. In his capacity at the GRI, Brooks is also the curator, and co-curator, of several archives including those of the Johnson Publishing Company, architect Paul Revere Williams, sculptor Richard Hunt, interdisciplinary artist, Maren Hassinger, and scholar Dr. Robert Farris Thompson, among others. His interviews and essays on African American art, and poetry, have been featured in Callaloo Journal, The International Review of African American Art, and the Aperture Foundation, as well as numerous exhibition catalogues. Brooks earned a Doctor of Philosophy, Art History, from City University of New York, NY, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) from Hunter College, NY.
About Jo Banner
Jo Banner is the founder and director of The Descendants Project, a nonprofit she co-founded with her twin sister, Dr. Joy Banner, in St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana. Holding bachelor’s and master’s degrees in communications, she uses her education to honor the legacy of enslaved people while defending descendant communities.Jo’s mission includes preserving the burial grounds of the enslaved and protecting the last 11 miles untouched by industrial development in Cancer Alley. Through her work, she envisions a just transition for people and land to achieve economic and environmental liberation.
About Dr. Joy Banner
Dr. Joy Banner is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of The Descendants Project, a nonprofit organization founded to protect the health, land, and lives of the Black descendant community in Louisiana’s River Parishes—an area known as “Cancer Alley.”After earning her Ph.D. in communications and B.S. in marketing from Louisiana State University, Dr. Banner taught business communications, marketing and entrepreneurship at LSU, where she advanced to Chair of the Management program before returning to her hometown of Wallace, Louisiana. Joy has 20+ years in heritage and tourism, which she has leveraged to champion the preservation of Black historic sites, heritage, and communities.
About Kathe Hambrick
Kathe Hambrick is the Executive Director of the Amistad Research Center, where she brings over 30 years of experience in public history, curation, and interpretation to preserve and share pivotal narratives of America’s ethnic and racial history. As the founder of the River Road African American Museum in Louisiana, Hambrick has championed the preservation of African American history in the Mississippi River parishes. She holds a Master’s in Museum Studies from Southern University at New Orleans (SUNO) and has curated over 100 exhibits, including “The Rural Roots of Jazz.” A published author and consultant, she continues to shape a more inclusive historical narrative through her work.
About Kristina Kay Robinson
Kristina Kay Robinson is a poet, writer, independent curator and visual artist born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her writing in various genres has appeared in Art in America, Harper’s Bazaar, Guernica, The Baffler, The Nation, The Massachusetts Review and Elle among other outlets. Robinson is a recipient of the Rabkin Prize for Visual Arts Journalism and an Andy Warhol Arts Writing grant. Currently she serves as the New Orleans editor at large for the Atlanta based, Burnaway magazine.
About the Amistad Research Center
The Amistad Research Center is the nation’s oldest, largest, and most comprehensive independent archives specializing in the history of African Americans and other ethnic minorities. The Center is dedicated to preserving this history by providing a home to manuscripts, photographs, books, periodicals, and works of art that bear witness to a post worth sharing with the future.
About The Descendants Project
The Descendants Project is an emerging organization committed to the intergenerational healing and flourishing of the Black descendant community in the Louisiana river parishes. The lands of the river parishes hold the intersecting histories of enslavement, settler colonialism, and environmental degradation.
We are descended from the enslaved men, women, and children who were forced to labor at one or more of the hundreds of plantations that line the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Baton Rouge. Starting in the 1970s, large industrial petrochemical plants began purchasing the land of these plantations still surrounded by vulnerable Black descendant communities. The region is now known as “Cancer Alley” for the extreme risks of cancer and death due to pollution. The community faces many other problems such as food insecurity, high unemployment, high poverty, land dispossession, and health issues that stem from a culture of disregard for Black communities and their quality of life.
Through programming, education, advocacy, and outreach, The Descendants Project is committed to reversing the vagrancies of slavery through healing and restorative work. We aim to eliminate the narrative violence of plantation tourism and champion the voice of the Black descendant community while demanding action that supports the total well-being of Black descendants.
About the River Road African American Museum
The mission of the River Road African American Museum (RRAAM) is to educate visitors about the history and culture of African Americans in the rural communities of south Louisiana through the collection, preservation, and interpretation of art, artifacts, and historic buildings.
About Dawoud Bey: Elegy
Dawoud Bey: Elegy draws upon the factual and imagined realities of the early African American presence in the United States. Including forty-five black-and-white photographs and two film installations, the exhibition elucidates the deeply profound historical memory still embedded in geography at historically significant sites in Virginia, Louisiana and Ohio. Through the interweaving of three photographic series—”Stony the Road “(2023), “In This Here Place” (2019), and “Night Coming Tenderly, Black” (2017)—Bey offers a framework through which to conceptualize the landscapes of Virginia, Louisiana, and Ohio (respectively) through images that convey the memories of our shared American past.