IMAGE: Dawoud Bey (American, born 1953), Conjoined Trees and Field (2019). Gelatin silver print. Rennie Collection, Vancouver, BC, Canada. © Dawoud Bey
DAWOUD BEY: ELEGY EXPLORES EARLY AFRICAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCES AS IMAGINED THROUGH HISTORICAL LANDSCAPES
Three Interwoven Series of Photographs and Two Films Are on View at NOMA Starting Friday, September 26
NEW ORLEANS — This month, the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) opens the highly anticipated exhibition Dawoud Bey: Elegy, on view at the museum September 26, 2025—January 4, 2026. A profound exploration of early experiences of African Americans in the United States, the groundbreaking survey, organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, marks the comprehensive exhibition of three photographic series and two film installations by renowned contemporary artist Dawoud Bey.
“We are honored to present this important exhibition, which asks us to consider art’s vital role in imagining our past, present, and future,” said Susan M. Taylor, The Montine McDaniel Freeman Director of NOMA. “The museum has a longstanding commitment to affirming photography’s role as a fine art, and Elegy offers the opportunity to present an expanded look at the work of an artist already represented in NOMA’s permanent collection.”
Elegy chronicles Bey’s radical shift from portraiture and street photography to meditations on history and landscape. The historically grounded images included in the exhibition spur moving and visceral experiences, inviting visitors to become active participants within Bey’s immersive compositions. From the historic Richmond Slave Trail, where enslaved Africans were marched towards auction blocks, to the plantations of Louisiana where enslaved people lived and labored, to the last miles of the Underground Railroad in Ohio, a route fugitive slaves traveled in their quest for freedom, Bey’s powerful images evoke both factual and imagined realities.
The exhibition marks the first time Bey’s In This Here Place series—created in Louisiana—will be on view in full in the state alongside two other important bodies of history-based work.
IMAGE: Dawoud Bey (American, born 1953), Tree and Cabin, 2019. Gelatin silver print. Rennie Collection, Vancouver, BC, Canada. © Dawoud Bey
“I’m really heartened that Elegy is opening in New Orleans at NOMA,” said artist Dawoud Bey. “It’s always meaningful when the history-based work that I am doing can be seen in the region where the work was made, creating an intimate and immediate conversation about place and history.”
The most comprehensive presentation of Bey’s landscape photography to date, Elegy is organized by Valerie Cassel Oliver, the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition features over 40 gelatin silver print photographs and two immersive film installations that originate from three distinct series—Stony the Road (2023), In This Here Place (2019) and Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017). Bey’s evolution from portraiture to landscape serves as a testament to the power of art in retelling history and encouraging dialogue, transporting viewers to sites in Virginia, Louisiana, and Ohio that present profound repositories of collective memory and witnesses to American history.
“Bey is one of the most important photographers working today,” said Brian Piper, Freeman Family Curator of Photographs, Prints, and Drawings at NOMA. “With works created in Louisiana, Virginia, and Ohio, each project in this exhibition reflects Bey’s in-depth research, his unique perspective, and his skill as an image-maker, prompting visitors to consider how history remains present in our contemporary world.”
Elegy opens with the photographic series Stony the Road (2023). Named after a line in the Black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the series visualizes the nearly three-mile-long Richmond Slave Trail, beginning at Manchester Docks and running alongside the James River in Richmond. This still-visible foot path served as the epicenter of the domestic slave trade where Africans arrived in bondage.
The exhibition also includes the related film 350,000 (2023). Produced in collaboration with cinematographer Bron Moyi, the work serves as a poignant reminder of the more than 350,000 men, women, and children sold into bondage in Richmond between 1830 and 1860. The film’s soundtrack, designed with Dr. E. Gaynell Sherrod, Professor of Dance and Choreography at Virginia Commonwealth University, was produced by recording interpretive dancers’ intonations and movements.
The second series of works in the exhibition, In This Here Place (2019), meditates on Black life and labor focusing solely on spaces and structures inhabited by enslaved people on plantations and along the Mississippi River in Louisiana. Bey’s photographs of these sites elucidate profound historical memories that remain embedded in the landscape and invite reflection upon our shared American past and contemporary moment.
Bey’s In This Here Place series is accompanied by a related three-screen video installation, entitled Evergreen (2021). Created in collaboration with vocalist and composer Imani Uzuri, Evergreen imparts a moving human presence to the otherwise uninhabited landscapes visible on Louisiana’s Evergreen Plantation, the only plantation in the Deep South that features original slave cabins in a historically accurate arrangement.
The exhibition concludes with Bey’s earliest series of landscape photographs, Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017), titled after a line from Langston Hughes’s poem “Dream Variations”. This selection of photographs, taken around Cleveland and Hudson, Ohio, imagines sites and pathways traveled by fugitives as they made their way along the last stages of the Underground Railroad.
Dawoud Bey (American, born 1953), Untitled #1 (Picket Fence and Farmhouse), 2017. Gelatin silver print. Rennie Collection, Vancouver, BC, Canada. © Dawoud Bey.
Here, Bey underscores the perilous circumstances and uncertain scenes that African Americans fleeing bondage may have encountered on their flights to self-emancipation. Here, Bey’s photographs of open farmland and tight brush, darkened homes and unwelcoming terrain, are rendered in rich, incredibly dark tones, underscoring the uncertain, invisible route to freedom under the cover of night.
“The narrative arc as presented through the photographic lens of Dawoud Bey is a deeply moving visual poem steeped in history and conceptual resonance,” said Valerie Cassel Oliver, Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. “Elegy will impact visitors and provide an unflinching look into the history of African Americans in this country as well as the enduring legacies of their experience.”
Related Programs
NOMA members have the first opportunity to see the exhibition on Thursday, September 25, 5:30–8:00 pm. Additionally, NOMA is hosting special member hours on Sunday, December 7, 9–10 am, before the museum opens to the public. Become a member today at noma.org/join.
On Friday, September 26, 6–9 pm, the museum is open late for NOMA at Night, an after hours opportunity to visit with performances, gallery talks, all-ages artmaking, and more inspired by the exhibition. Cocktails, mocktails, and light bites are available for purchase at Café NOMA.
Visitors are invited to engage with the exhibition’s works and themes further on Saturday, September 27, 1:00–4:30 pm, at an afternoon symposium featuring two panels: The first conversation is between 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 catalogue contributor LeRonn Brooks. The second panel, moderated by Kristina Kay Robinson, includes Kathe Hambrick, Executive of the Director Amistad Research Center and Founder of The River Road African American Museum; and Jo Banner and Dr. Joy Banner, co-founders of The Descendants Project. A signing of the exhibition catalogue follows.
Two of the museum’s upcoming book club discussions will be connected to the exhibition: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (Thursday, September 18) and How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith (Thursday, November 13).
Gallery talks related to the exhibition are scheduled for Wednesdays, October 1 and 22, November 5, and December 10, at 12:30 and 6:00 pm each day.
Exhibition Catalogue
A fully illustrated hard-bound catalogue, published by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Aperture Foundation, accompanies the exhibition and is available for sale in the NOMA Museum Shop and online at shop.noma.org. The volume includes essays by Cassel Oliver and contributing authors LeRonn Brooks, Imani Perry, and Christina Sharpe.
About Artist Dawoud Bey
Groundbreaking American artist and MacArthur Fellow Dawoud Bey examines the Black past and present. His photographs and film installations engage the oft disappeared histories of the Black presence in America. Bey began his career as a photographer in 1975 with a series of photographs, “Harlem, U.S.A,,” that were exhibited to critical acclaim in his first one-person exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. His work has since been the subject of numerous major museum and gallery exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe, with works held in numerous public collections.
Recent solo museum exhibitions include Elegy, an exhibition of the artist’s history-based photographs and film works first debuted at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (2023-2024) which will travel to the New Orleans Museum of Art (2025-2026); Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits, the first standalone museum show to explore the iconic series, at the Denver Art Museum (2024-2025); and Dawoud Bey: An American Project (2020-2022), which was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and traveled to the High Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. His work was also recently the subject of the two-person exhibition Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue organized by the Grand Rapids Museum of Art that traveled to the Seattle Art Museum, Tampa Museum of Art, and The Getty Center.
Bey’s work has been the subject of several monographs, including Elegy (Aperture/VMFA, 2023), a major publication documenting his landscape retrospective at VMFA, a forty-year retrospective monograph Seeing Deeply (University of Texas Press, 2017), and the recent Street Portraits (MACK Books, 2021). His critical writings on contemporary art and photography have appeared in a range of publications, including recent monograph essays on artists Jordan Casteel and Deborah Roberts.
In addition to his MacArthur Fellowship, Bey is a recipient of many awards and distinctions, including recognition by the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2025), American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2024), the College Art Association (2023), the ICP Infinity Award (2019), a Lifetime Achievement Award from Howard University (2017), the United States Artists Fellowship (2015), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2002), and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1991), among many other honors. He has been the recipient of four honorary doctorate degrees.
Bey lives and works in Chicago and New York. He is a Critic and alumnus at Yale University and is Professor Emeritus at Columbia College, Chicago. He is represented by Sean Kelly Gallery, NY and LA, Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago, and Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco.
Exhibition Credits
Dawoud Bey: Elegy is organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and is curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. Presentation of the exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art is coordinated by Brian Piper, Freeman Family Curator of Photographs, Prints and Drawings and is supported by David and Susanne Purvis, Delta Airlines, Tod and Kenya Smith, and Stewart and Renee Peck. Additional support is provided by the Del and Ginger Hall Photography Fund and the A. Charlotte Mann and Joshua Mann Pailet Endowment. This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.
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Media Contacts
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The New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) and its Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden are home to innovative exhibitions, installations, educational programs, and research. Exploring human creativity across time, cultures, and disciplines, the global scope of the museum’s initiatives open a vibrant dialogue with the history and culture of New Orleans. The museum stewards a collection of nearly 50,000 works, with exceptional holdings in African art, photography, decorative arts, and Japanese art, as well as strengths in American and French art, and an expanding collection highlighting contemporary artists. The museum’s exhibitions and dynamic learning and engagement offerings serve as a forum for visitors to engage with diverse perspectives, share cultural experiences, and foster a life of learning at all ages.
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