About This Image

Exhibited: Dawoud Bey: Portraits 1975-1995, September 17-December 10, 1995, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (traveling exhibition).

Dawoud Bey (born 1953) is an American photographer renowned for his large-scale color portraits of adolescents and other often marginalized subjects. Size refers to each panel. Overall size of group of images is approximately 64 x 66 inches.

Born David Edward Smikle in New York City's Jamaica, Queens neighborhood, he changed his name to Dawoud Bey in the early 1970s. He studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York from 1977–78, graduated with a BFA in Photography from Empire State College in 1990, and received his MFA from Yale University School of Art in 1993. Over the course of his career, Bey has participated in more than 20 artist residencies, which has allowed him to work directly with the adolescent subjects of his most recent work.

Of his work with teenagers Bey has said, "My interest in young people has to do with the fact that they are the arbiters of style in the community; their appearance speaks most strongly of how a community of people defines themselves at a particular historical moment."

Currently living in Chicago, Illinois Bey teaches at Columbia College Chicago.

Bey was the recipient of an artist fellowship at Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS), New York in 1983, an artist fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 1986, a regional fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1991, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2002. He has exhibited in a number of solo and group shows including Dawoud Bey: Portraits 1975-1995 at the Walker Art Center in 1995, Dawoud Bey at the Queens Museum of Art in 1998, Dawoud Bey: The Chicago Project at the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art in 2003, Dawoud Bey: Detroit Portraits at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 2004, and Class Pictures, organized by the Aperture Foundation and on view initially at the Addison Gallery of American Art in 2007, and then touring to museums throughout the country for four years, including the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the Milwaukee Art Museum among others.

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