November 21st, 2012

Birmingham on My Mind

September 15, 1963 - Fifty Years Later

One night, many years ago, a book appeared in my suburban Jamaica, NY home. My parents had attended a lecture that James Baldwin had given at our church, Calvary Baptist Church, and had returned with the book in hand.

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On The Passing of Two Giants

This has been a difficult month, what with the loss of poet and activist Louis Reyes Rivera, and even more recently the esteemed artist Elizabeth Catlett.

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Reshaping The Art/Museum/Public Experience

The past few months have been interesting ones for those interested in the ways in which art practice, public institutional practice and their various audiences interact.

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The recent passing of Dr. Billy Taylor was marked by notices of his contribution to jazz music as both musician and advocate.

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Recent Censorship Recalls Spirit of an Earlier Era

In 1936 Adolf Hitler, German Chancellor, instructed Adolf Ziegler, president of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, to put together an “exhibition of shame”, depicting the “deterioration of art since 1910”.

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John Boehner Fires the Opening Salvo

I had the rather auspicious fortune to be in Washington, DC for several days this past week when the opening salvo of a new round in the Culture Wars was fired by Congressman John Boehner.

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A Different Kind of MoMA?

On a recent trip to New York I had one of those rare epiphany like moments where I found myself standing in front of a group of works that spoke clearly to how the work we do as artists might actually matter in the world.

National Endowment for the Arts chair Rocco Landesman was in Chicago recently, holding a series of meetings, gatherings, and conversations with various institutions and the arts community.

I was the speaker at the Yale University School of Art Commencement this past Monday. The School of Art ceremony followed the school wide ceremony on the Old Campus where, among others, Aretha Franklin fittingly received an honorary Doctor of Music degree.

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The Society of Photographic Education Meets in Philadelphia

The Society for Photographic Education held its national conference this past week in Philadelphia.

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Published here are the remarks I gave during my opening Keynote Address at the College Art Association Conference Convocation here in Chicago on Wednesday evening.

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The 60s and 70s Redux: All Power to the People

I could not have imagined when I was sixteen and seventeen years old selling The Black Panther newspaper on Jamaica Avenue in Queens, NY that forty years later I would finally meet the man who not only visually shaped the paper but also created the ico

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A Sublime Experience in Worcester, MA

I had the opportunity during an unusually busy month to catch the curated exhibition project by sculptor Rona Pondick.

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When I was a kid the calm evening air would sometimes be dramatically and suddenly broken by my father's excited shout. "There's a blue on!" he would cry out from the living room.

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[Note: Today I am turning this space over to my good friend the writer and playwright Ifa Bayeza. Ifa's critically acclaimed play "The Ballad of Emmett Till" completed a successful run at the Goodman Theater here in Chicago a year ago, where it premiered.

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Where the Past Meets the Present

I was in New York recently, the East Village actually, and from my usual perch at BBar on East 4th Street and the Bowery found myself reflecting on the rapid pace of change in that neighborhood. I had worked on St.

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Where People Go to Be Themselves in Public

Cities are composed of diverse communities. The makeup of these communities is determined by everything from ethnicity, culture, economics, patterns of migration and more than a little bit of overt and covert social engineering.

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Frank Gohlke's Queens Photographs

Photographer Frank Gohlke was in Chicago recently as my invited guest at Columbia College Chicago.

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When Artists Rock the [Art] House

I was asked to give a presentation for the Education Committee at the Museum of Contemporary Art a few weeks ago. The committee is comprised of educational and curatorial staff, along with a few trustees and patrons.

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Art and Youth - A Powerful Combination

One day when I was in grade school, my class took a field trip to Carnegie Hall, then the home of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.

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University Moves to Close Rose Art Museum

That sound you may have heard the past two days rippling through the art world was the sound of a collective shudder, as Brandeis University's trustees unexpectedly announced that it would sell off some 6,000 modern and contemporary artworks in the museum's

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Barack Obama's historic ascendency as the 44th president of the United States certainly signal a huge paradigm shift, one that has numerous national and global implications.

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With Barack Obama's inauguration as the nation's forty-fourth president a scant five days away, excitement and anticipation are building as we enter a moment of profound change and potential paradigm shifts.

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I particpated in an Artists at Work panel discussion at the Chicago Cultural Center three nights ago.

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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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