POSTPONED: Annual Benesse Lecture & FotoFocus Annual Spring Lecture Conversation with the Artist: Dawoud Bey

Thursday, March 2, 2023 from 7–8:30 p.m.

Due to unforeseen circumstances, this lecture has been postponed. Please check back for further information. 

Free. Reservations recommended.

The Cincinnati Art Museum is honored to present a conversation with renowned American photographer Dawoud Bey. Generously cosponsored by FotoFocus and additionally supported by the Donald P. Sowell Committee, the conversation celebrates the museum’s acquisition of an iconic work by the artist: A Couple in Prospect Park (1990). A highly regarded speaker and educator, Bey will be joined in conversation by CAM’s Curator of Photography and a small group of area photography students.

Join us for a pre-event reception beginning at 6 p.m. Light bites will be provided and a cash bar available.

The Annual Benesse Lecture is endowed by the Benesse Corporation. Generously co-sponsored by FotoFocus, with the additional support of the Donald P. Sowell Committee.

About the Artist

Dawoud Bey, based in Chicago, was born in 1953 in Queens, New York. Long admired for his rich, psychologically compelling portraits, Bey explores a range of photographic tools and approaches to create images and projects that connect deeply with the communities he photographs. In recent years, Bey has focused on built environments and landscapes to visualize collective experience, memory, and history, using photography as a vehicle to make these resonant in the contemporary moment.

Bey first came to attention with Harlem, U.S.A. (1975-1979)—a body of work that comprised his first solo exhibition, mounted at The Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. Since then, Bey’s practice has explored empathetic, nuanced, and relational depiction of underrepresented subjects. In succeeding decades and successive bodies of work, he has moved from photographing in the streets with a hand-held 35mm camera to creating more formally structured portraits using a tripod mounted 4 x 5 camera, and to working in-studio with the monumental 20 x 24 Polaroid view camera. His projects have often redefined how artists engage with institutions, striving to make those spaces more accessible to the communities they serve.

Dawoud Bey holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University School of Art and is currently Professor of Art and a former Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago. In 2017 Bey was awarded the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship. He is also the recipient of fellowships from United States Artists, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among other honors.

Bey’s work has been included in solo and group exhibitions worldwide and is included in the permanent collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Brooklyn Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, High Museum of Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Museum of Modern Art, NY, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem, Tate Modern, Whitney Museum of American Art, and other museums internationally. Among numerous important titles on or by the artist, a forty-year retrospective, Dawoud Bey: Seeing Deeply, was published by the University of Texas Press in 2018, and Dawoud Bey: Two American Projects was published by Yale University Press and SFMOMA in 2020.

Image credit: Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953), A Couple in Prospect Park, 1990, printed 2022,from the series Polaroid Street Portraits, 1988–1991, inkjet print, 40 x 30 in. (101.6 x 76.2 cm), Cincinnati Art Museum; Museum Purchase: FotoFocus Art Purchase Fund, 2022.201,© Dawoud Bey, courtesy of Sean Kelly

If you need accessibility accommodations for any programs or events, please email [email protected]. Please contact us at least two weeks in advance to ensure accommodations can be made.