Lecture: April 17, 2019, 7pm
Dawoud Bey began his career as an artist in 1975 with a series of photographs entitled Harlem, USA, that were exhibited in his first one-person exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. He has since had numerous exhibitions worldwide, at institutions such as the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. His work is included in the permanent collections of over fifty museums throughout the United States and Europe, and will be the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2020.
Bey’s many museum-based projects have focused on opening those institutions up to the communities in which they are situated. He has been particularly concerned with making arts institutions more accessible to young people through a series of participatory projects realized for a wide range of venues, including the Addison Gallery of American Art, Birmingham Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, Walker Art Center, Wadsworth Atheneum, Wexner Center for the Arts, and the National Portrait Gallery, London. In addition, he has curated exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, DePaul Art Museum, Hyde Park Art Center, Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Walters Art Museum, the Weatherspoon Art Museum, and elsewhere.
Bey was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, also known as “the Genius Grant,” in 2017, and is the recipient of fellowships from United States Artists, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lucie Foundation, among other honors. His work is the subject of several monographs and publications, including Class Pictures (Aperture, 2007), Harlem, USA (Yale University Press, 2012), Picturing People (Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 2012), and Dawoud Bey: The Birmingham Project (Birmingham Museum of Art, 2013). Most recently in Fall 2018 a major forty-year retrospective publication, Dawoud Bey: Seeing Deeply, was published by the University of Texas Press.
About the Judith Zabar Visiting Artists Program
In November 2007, Hunter College received a generous commitment to establish the Judith Zabar Visiting Artist Program Fund. The Fund has allowed Hunter to bring a series of internationally recognized artists to campus to work directly with students in the MFA program, in master classes, critical seminars, and private tutorials, providing students with the unique opportunity to interact with top practitioners in the field. Zabar Visiting Artists also present public lectures where they discuss their work, engage in conversation with members of Hunter’s faculty, and with Hunter’s broader student community and the general public. Past Zabar artists have included: Vito Acconci, Janine Antoni, Julie Ault, Robert Barry, Tania Bruguera, Mel Chin, Peter Doig, Nicole Eisenman, Rochelle Feinstein, Charles Gaines, Alfredo Jaar, Joan Jonas, Martin Kersels, Jeff Koons, Glenn Ligon, Sharon Lockhart, Robert Longo, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Christian Marclay, Kerry James Marshall, Tracey Moffatt, Matt Mullican, Wangechi Mutu, Gabriel Orozco, Laura Owens, Trevor Paglen, Elizabeth Peyton, Paul Pfeiffer, William Pope L., Walid Ra’ad, Yvonne Rainer, Doris Salcedo, Shahzia Sikander, Michael Smith, Frances Stark, Fred Tomaselli, Nari Ward, Carrie Mae Weems, and Stanley Whitney.
