Dawoud Bey

American, born 1953

BiographyDawoud Bey was born in 1953 in Queens, New York, and is based in
Chicago. Bey holds a Master of Fine Arts 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, the National Endowment for the
Arts, amongst other honors. In 2020, the San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art opened a major
retrospective exhibition of Bey’s work which also traveled to the High
Museum of Art, Atlanta. In 2022, the Grand Rapids Art Museum
organized the two-person exhibition Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae
Weems: In Dialogue, which will travel to the J. Paul Getty Museum,
Los Angeles in the spring of 2023. Bey’s work is featured in numerous
publications, and is the subject of numerous 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). In 2018, a major fortyyear
retrospective publication, Dawoud Bey: Seeing Deeply, was
published by the University of Texas Press. In 2020, Yale University
Press and SFMOMA published the monograph Dawoud Bey: Two
American Projects. Dawoud Bey’s work has been included in important
solo and group exhibitions worldwide and is included in the permanent
collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Art Institute of
Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the
Detroit Institute of Arts, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University,
Works of Art for Consideration Toledo Museum of Art
the High Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Museum of
Contemporary Art Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary
Photography, the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the
Studio Museum in Harlem, the Tate Modern, the Whitney Museum of
American Art, and other museums around the world.

Person TypeIndividual