In each installment of The Artists, T highlights a recent or little-seen work by a Black artist, along with a few words from that artist putting the work in context. This week, we're looking at a photograph by Dawoud Bey, whose latest exhibition, "In This Here Place," opened at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York on Sept. 10.
Name: Dawoud Bey
Age: 67
Based in: Chicago
Originally from: Queens, N.Y.
Where and when did you make this work? The works in this series were made in 2019 in the communities of Edgard, Destrehan, Vacherie and Wallace, in Louisiana. I'd been spending a lot of time in New Orleans doing research and decided to start looking into Louisiana's relationship to the institution of slavery, which brought me to the five plantations that I ended up photographing on and around.
Can you describe what is going on in the work? The photograph visualizes the now silent and unpopulated landscape of what was once 350 plantations along the west banks of the Mississippi River. I was looking to turn the image of these slave cabins - the relationship of the cabins to the landscape, and the way that the shadow in the photograph becomes another form that echoes the form and the shape of the cabins themselves - into a resonant and dynamic formal representation. So I'm looking to relate form to the narrative of place. I guess that's the best answer: It's about relating form to the narrative of place, and creating an interesting form through which to talk about that narrative.
