Dawoud Bey

A Young Man Resting on an Exercise Bike Amityville, NY, 1988

Dawoud Bey Biography Groundbreaking American artist and MacArthur Fellow Dawoud Bey examines the Black past and present through photographs and film installations that engage the often-disappeared histories of Black life in America. Bey began his career in 1975 with Harlem, U.S.A., a series of tender street portraits that earned critical acclaim in his first solo exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. Over five decades, Dawoud Bey's photography has moved from portraiture toward landscape and historical reckoning, from Class Pictures and The Birmingham Project-which memorializes the 1963 bombing of Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church-to Night Coming Tenderly, Black, which imagines the fugitive passage of the Underground Railroad in deep shades of black and gray. Dawoud Bey was born David Edward Smikle in 1953 in Jamaica, Queens, New York, and adopted his name in the early 1970s. Introduced to photography as a teenager, he was shaped by the Metropolitan Museum's 1969 exhibition Harlem on My Mind, which prompted his own documentary project on the neighborhood. Bey earned a BFA from Empire State College and an MFA from Yale University School of Art. Dawoud Bey's work has been the subject of several monographs, including Elegy (Aperture/VMFA, 2023), the forty-year retrospective Seeing Deeply (University of Texas Press, 2017), and Street Portraits (MACK Books, 2021). His critical writings on contemporary art and photography appear widely, with recent monograph essays on Jordan Casteel and Deborah Roberts. Beyond his MacArthur Fellowship, Bey has been recognized by the American Academy in Berlin (2026), American Academy of Arts and Letters (2025), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2024), and holds the ICP Infinity Award (2019), the United States Artists Fellowship (2015), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2002), and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship (1991), among many honors and four honorary doctorates. The photographs of Dawoud Bey are held in major public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, High Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Detroit Institute of Arts. Recent solo museum exhibitions include Elegy (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2023-2024; traveling to the New Orleans Museum of Art, 2025-2026); Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits (Denver Art Museum, 2024-2025); and the retrospective Dawoud Bey: An American Project (2020-2022), organized by SFMOMA and the Whitney. In 2026, Bey curated Gordon Parks: The South in Color at Jackson Fine Art, the gallery's first collaboration with the artist.