I particpated in an Artists at Work panel discussion at the Chicago Cultural Center three nights ago. The hall was packed with people (presumably artists) who had come to hear me, Joyce Owens, Tony Fitzpatrick, Juan Angel Chavez, and moderator Paul Klein hold forth on "Turning Your Art Into A Career." I am always a little hesitant about participating in these kinds of events, not being sure what will ensue, and if one and a half hours is indeed enough time to say everything that needs to be said to an audience that presumably has a a wide range of experiences, but perhaps still feels lacking in that one or two crucial pieces of information that will perhaps move them forward in their careers.
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I was in Nashville, TN for a couple of days last week, where I gave a lecture at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts and spent time at Fisk University visiting the storied Carl Van Vechten Gallery, and viewing some of the partially restored Aaron Douglas murals on campus. The Frist is housed in a magnificent beaux arts building that used to be home to Nashville's main post office.
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How One Institution Has Made A Huge Difference

I received the recent issue of Contact Sheet, the publication produced by Light Work that documents its programs, resident artists, and exhibitions. This particular issue, Number 147, takes note of the organization's extraordinary thirty-five year history. For those of you not familiar with the organization, Light Work is the Syracuse, NY based organization that has diligently served the photographic community for three and a half decades.
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Barack Obama's Election - The View from Chicago 

My son and I went to Grant Park on Tuesday night for the election night Barack Obama rally and victory celebration, standing for hours amongst a veritable sea of our fellow Chicagoans. A once in a lifetime world changing event like this was not something I was going to let my son miss. I had figured he might eventually see something like this in his lifetime; I honestly didn't think it would happen in mine.
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Believe In Change

Sarah Palin (with the complicity of John McCain) is doing her best to stir the pots of racism and xenophobia in the waning days of their failing campaign. Her increasingly inflammatory remarks to crowds of agitated, undereducated, uninformed, and presumably economically on edge admirers are beginning to elicit the kinds of responses that reveal her and her followers for just what they are.
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Young Artists Take the Lead in Making a Difference

A group of former students from California College of the Arts have gotten together to form Art for Obama, an online auction of photographs to raise campaign funds for the Obama/Biden ticket.

A Beautifully Poetic Show

I haven't written anything on the blog for a few weeks, but not for want of things to write about. I recently attended the opening of a wonderful exhibition that prompted this entry.  I have known Jin Lee's photographs for some time, having seen one of her "Heads" in an exhibition in the photography galleries at the Art Institute of Chicago long before I lived here, and long before I ever met Jin, who I have now come to count among my friends.

Photographing Barack

I've had the opportunity over the years to do commissioned portraits of a number of people. Of all of those sittings, none has given me as much pleasure as being able to make a portrait of the next president of the United States of America, Barack Obama, in his home here in Chicago's Hyde Park. I'm happy to offer a limited edition print of this portrait to those of you who both admire my work and who also support Barack's historic quest for the presidency.
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Opening Up The Curatorial Process

I've been in Baltimore, MD for the past three weeks working at the Walters Art Museum on a curatorial project with twelve Baltimore area teenagers that will culminate in an exhibition at the museum in December entitled The Portrait Re/Examined.
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The Difference Between Making It Up and Seeing It

Richard "Chip" Benson (seen above in an earlier Lee Friedlander photograph) once said something when I was a graduate student in the Photography program at Yale that has stayed with me all these years. Of course Chip said a lot of things during my two years there and in the many years before and after that I'm sure were equally as insightful.
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Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey
Photo © by Jason Smikle
About Me
About Me
Chicago, IL, United States
I began making photographs in 1969 after seeing the "Harlem On My Mind" exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I had inherited my first camera the year before from my godfather Artie Miller when I was fifteen years old. I began my first project "Harlem, USA" as a direct result of that exhibition and my own family's history in the Harlem community. Born in Queens, NY my formal training began by apprenticing to local commercial and fashion photographer Levy J. Smith and then later studying at the School of Visual Arts with Larry Siegel, William Broecker, Shelley Rice and Sid Kaplan. I completed my undergraduate work at Empire State College under the guidance of Mel Rosenthal and Joe Goldberg and did my MFA at Yale University in the graduate photography program under the watchful and rigorous eyes of Tod Papageorge and Richard Benson, along with Lois Conner, Frank Gohlke, Susan Kismaric and Joel Sternfeld. Classes with Robert Farris Thompson and Michael Romer significantly rounded out my graduate work. A former Guggenheim and NEA fellow, I am currently Professor of Art and Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago, where I have taught since 1998.
"What's Going On?"
"What's Going On?"
Marvin Gaye's signature song "What's Going On?"--a musical critique of a world gone off track--provides an apt framework for looking at the role of art and cultural production in the larger society.

With so much art being made at all ends of the market, it's always a good thing for artists to look both forward and back in trying to access the role that art can play in a larger society, a society that actually exists largely outside of the distorting bubble of the Art World. When one of my students recently answered the question of why she was in school in an MFA program with, "So I can be a part of the system," I knew it was time for a reassessment and a forum from which to look at the various histories in my own little corner of the art and "real" world.

Artists used to be the ones who led the charge to challenge the system; they were the proverbial "fly in the buttermilk," the monkey wrench that mucked up the system and made it act, function, and exist in new ways. Artists were the ones who created paradigms of everything the system was not. James Baldwin once said, "Artists are here to disturb the peace."

This blog will range freely over a range of issues, highlighting individuals, events, and ideas that provide a catalyst for thought and reflection. Hopefully for younger artists it might provide a sense of a world both in and outside of the so-called art world, and hopefully provoke a conversation about the relationship between the two while offering a thought or two about just what ones work might be about as one attempts to engage both history and the contemporary moment.

For others this blog might serve as a window into how one particular artist, after three decades of practice, sees and thinks about the vast world of human social and aesthetic experience. Consider this my own small commentary or my brain periodically laid bare for your perusal and consideration.

Feel free to use the "Comments" button to share your thoughts and responses if so provoked.
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