E-Photo
Issue #235  10/16/2017
 
Artist Dawoud Bey Receives 2017 MacArthur Fellowship
Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey

Noted American artist and photographer Dawoud Bey has been named one of this year's MacArthur Fellows.

Bey began his career as an artist in 1975 with a series of photographs, "Harlem, USA," that were later exhibited in his first one-person exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979 while he a Cultural Council Foundation/CETA Artist-In-Residence at SHM. He has since had numerous exhibitions worldwide, at such institutions 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 in Atlanta, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and other museums worldwide.

The Walker Art Center organized a mid-career survey of his work, "Dawoud Bey: Portraits 1975-1995," that was curated by Kellie Jones, and traveled to institutions throughout the United States and Europe. "Class Pictures: Photographs by Dawoud Bey" was published by Aperture in 2007. A traveling exhibition of this work toured to museum throughout the country from 2007 - 2011. "Harlem, USA" was published by Yale University Press in conjunction with the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012, where the work was exhibited in its entirety for the first time since it was first shown at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. A survey exhibition of his work, "Picturing People", opened at the Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago in 2012, and traveled to museums in the United States.

Born in New York, Dawoud Bey holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University School of Art, and is currently Professor of Art and a Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago, where he has taught since 1998. He has been honored with numerous fellowships over the course of his long career, including the MacArthur Fellowship, the United States Artists Guthman Fellowship, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among others.