Dawoud Bey: Mary Parker and Caela Cowan, 2012. 2 inkjet prints mounted to dibond. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of the Collectors Committee and the Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund.
Dawoud Bey: Birmingham Project – NGA Washington Dawoud Bey’s Poignant ‘The Birmingham Project’ on view at National Gallery of Art, Washington, September 12, 2018, through March 17, 2019]]>
Source: National Gallery of Art, Washington
For more than 40 years photographer Dawoud Bey (b. 1953) has portrayed American youth and those from marginalized communities with an unusual degree of sensitivity and complexity. “Dawoud Bey: The Birmingham Project” celebrates the National Gallery of Art’s recent acquisition of four large-scale photographs and one video from Bey’s most important series, “The Birmingham Project,” a deeply felt and conceptually rich monument to the victims of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 15, 1963. Coinciding with the 55th anniversary of this tragedy, the exhibition focuses on Bey’s representation of the past through the lens of the present, pushing the boundaries of portraiture and engaging ongoing national issues of racism, violence against African Americans, and terrorism in churches.
In these photographs Bey pairs two life-size portraits representing the victims of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing and related violence in Birmingham that Sunday in 1963: one portrait of a young person the same age as one of the victims, and another of an adult 50 years older—the child’s age had he or she survived. The exhibition also features “9.15.63”, a split-screen projection that juxtaposes a re-creation of a drive to the 16th Street Baptist Church filmed from the window of a moving car with views of everyday spaces—some familiar (a beauty parlor and barbershop), some politically charged (a lunch counter and schoolroom).
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