Oxbow School Visiting Artist Lecture: Dawoud Bey

The Visiting Artists Program is a highlight of Napa's Oxbow School, a visual arts program for high school juniors and seniors. Oxbow and COPIA offer the lecture segment of the program free to the public.

For more information, visit www.oxbowschool.org or call 707-255-6000

Dawoud Bey began his career as a photographer 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. He has since had numerous exhibitions worldwide, at such institutions as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Barbican Centre in London, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA, the National Portrait Gallery in London, and the Whitney Museum of American Art among many others. The Walker Art Center organized a mid-career survey of his work, “Dawoud Bey: Portraits 1975-1995,” that traveled to institutions throughout the United States and Europe. A major publication was also published in conjunction with the exhibition. Aperture recently published his latest project, Class Pictures, in September 2007 and a traveling exhibition of this work that will tour museums throughout the country for five years.

Since 1992 Bey’s photographic work has focused on the teenage subject, attempting to describe the essential emotional, physical, and psychological aspect of these young people. These large scale color photographs deconstruct commonly held notions of young people in favor of a more complex and compelling visual description. His most recent work includes texts by his young subjects along with the photographs.

Dawoud Bey’s works are included in the permanent collections of numerous museum, both here and abroad, including the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and other museums world wide. He has received numerous fellowships over the course of his career, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

His critical writings have appeared in publications throughout Europe and the United States, and he has curated exhibitions at museums and galleries internationally as well.

 He holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University, and is currently Professor of Photography at Columbia College Chicago, where has taught since 1998.