Dawoud Bey acknowledges the cross-generational wrestle for civil rights
Dawoud Bey is a photographer, educator, and social activist whose work focuses on the lives of black Americans and other marginalized communities in the ongoing struggle for civil rights.
Bey's new monograph, published in the San Francisco Museum of Art together with Yale University Press and coinciding with a large retrospective of his work in the museum, is a departure from his typical aesthetic.
The two series presented in the book, which were presented as installations at the exhibition, show monumental black-and-white images that focus on historical events and collective memory.
The night comes tenderly, Black (2017) recalls the experience of a slave escaping to freedom via the Ohio Underground Railroad, while The Birmingham Project (2012) pays homage to the six black teenagers who were killed in the bombings on the Ku Klux Klan were killed in 16th Street Baptist Church on September 15, 1963.
In the intergenerational series, portraits are paired with diptychs: on the one hand, a child the age of the young girls and boys who died in the bombing raids, and on the other hand, an adult at the age at which the murdered child would have been The picture was taken.
Pentagram's Eddie Opara created the design for the book, which reflects the contrasts at the center of Bey's work, in which conceptual arrangements of images into grids and pairings often occur. In the book, the series were paired side by side to represent two different projects by the same artist that tell a linked story.
Juxtapositions in typography reflect the contrasts of the series, while the two series are arranged in a series of curatorial essays that offer insight into Bey's art and historical context to the works presented.
Dawoud Bey: Two American projects are published by the San Francisco Museum of Art and the Yale University Press