Dawoud Bey: Elegy

by Charles McGuigan 11.2023

All art, in the very germ of its seed, is political. Which is not to say Democrat or Republican, Progressive or Independent. For art springs from the politics of humanity, a deep well that quenches the thirst for ultimate truths, and propels us forward in a sort of aesthetic evolution that actually alters the mind and the soul and the heart. With Guernica, Pablo Picasso compelled us to confront the real terrors of war.  Mary Cassatt insisted we acknowledge a noxious patriarchy that had ruled the West for millennia. And Dawoud Bey reminds us of the eternal horrors of the enslavement of Africans, and the persistence of racism in our culture.     

When he was a little boy, David Smikle was planning to visit the home of one of his classmates for a playdate. His father was going to take his son over to the boy’s house, but then the mother of David’s friend told them not to come to the front door, that they would have to enter through the back door in the rear of the house, hidden from street view. That was one of the first times that David Smikle, who would become world-renowned artist Dawoud Bey, understood firsthand that racial prejudice was woven inextricably into the American tapestry.

When I recently asked this Queens, New York native about those early experiences, he wrote: “Racism was alive and well in Queens as it was everywhere else at that historical moment.” He would remember a teacher “who couldn’t believe that I had done the homework that I did, since a little Black boy could not have been capable of this, with the language I was using, without copying it from somewhere. A little Black boy who had the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Encyclopedia of American Poetry, among many other books, in his home was something that they simply could not fathom. I was sent to the Guidance Counselor’s office for all kinds of imagined infractions, solely because I was one of a handful of Black children bused into largely white schools after busing was mandated.”

“Dawoud Bey: Elegy,” which runs through February 25, 2024 at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, is unlike anything you have ever seen before. It is made up of three photographic series and two film installations, and the images will leave you mesmerized and amazed, and saddened beyond belief in your deep heart’s core.  Dawoud’s use of stark landscapes, sans color, evokes the spirit of a place out of time. Each carefully framed image rings with eternal truths that are beyond denial and not restricted by any calendar.

Richmonders will at once recognize every image in “Stony the Road.” These twelve photographs were commissioned by the VMFA, and shot by Dawoud along The Trail of Enslaved Africans, sometimes called The Richmond Slave Trail. Anyone who has spent time in that place on Richmond’s Southside knows the shudder you feel while walking along those worn paths. Dawoud captures the essence of that spirit through his extraordinary understanding of how a place and its storied past reverberates down the long corridors of time. 

When I asked the artist how he achieved this effect, he responded: “By using black and white film and large scale black and white prints, I eliminate one material aspect of the present world that we live in: color. And I also make my photographs from an eye level vantage point, which also suggests that landscape might have been viewed as if through the eyes of the enslaved African Americans who inhabited or occupied that land. The work is about bringing that horrific history into the present moment, creating a palpable sense of that past in our own time through the work.”

It should come as no surprise that this exhibit was organized by Valerie Cassel Oliver, the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art, who has helped re-imagine the function of a public art gallery. She has been responsible for some of the most powerful installations in recent memory, including the two showstoppers that followed in rapid succession—“The Dirty South: Contemporary, and the Sonic Impulse” and “Isaac Julien: The Lessons of the Hour, Frederick Douglass.”   

“Elegy” unites three photographic series (“Stony the Road,” “In This Here Place,”and “Night Coming Tenderly, Black”)  and two short films (“Evergreen” and “350,00”) that celebrate Dawoud’s quantum jump from portraiture and street photography to landscapes that invite the viewer to experience the living horrors of our history. 

One series of photographs, titled “In This Here Place,” was created in 2019 by Dawoud who trained his sensitive lens on the grounds and ancient slave cabins surrounding Louisiana’s Evergreen plantation down along the Mississippi. In those black and white images Dawoud is able to bring to life the inescapable nightmare of human beings shackled and abused for life. As with all the landscape photographs in “Elegy” this grouping of photographs does more than invite viewers to experience the inhumanity of chattel slavery: It commands them to do so. 

The last photo series in this exhibition was actually the first series of landscape photographs Dawoud Bey ever did. Called Night Coming Tenderly, Black, these photographs were taken in northeastern Ohio and give a sense of what the final stages on the Underground Railroad must have been like for the men and women who struggled against all odds to gain their freedom. Although this was Dawoud’s first landscape series, it was not the first time his art addressed historic moments.

“The Birmingham Project, which is not included in the VMFA exhibition, was the first in the history-based series of works I have been doing,” Dawoud said. “It was provoked by the memory of seeing a picture of the surviving sister of one of the four girls who were killed in the dynamiting blast at 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963. The picture, which I first saw in a book when I was 11-years old, came rushing back to me one morning, and I decided I needed to go to Birmingham and make some work about that history which still haunted me.” And then, he added: “I plan to continue this history-based work that I am doing, though having just completed ‘Stony the Road; and ‘350,000’ here in Richmond I’m not exactly sure what that will be. I do have an idea for the next film that I want to do, and it will continue to examine the Black American historical landscape, but from a much more personal vantage point.”  

When I asked what sensations he had while photographing along The Trail of Enslaved Africans, Dawoud responded, “As I was photographing and filming there I was imagining what this foreign terrain might have felt like to those enslaved Africans experiencing for the first time, not knowing exactly where they were going and where this unknown trail ended, what was around each bend of the trail. So I tried to make the work from the vantage point of an unknown terrain, fraught with fear, looming horror, and anticipation.”

Dawoud also learned as much he possibly could about Richmond’s notorious slave trade from the folks who have made a careful study of it, including Ana Edwards, education programs manager at the American Civil War Museum.

“I did indeed did spend time with Ana Edwards, whose father happens to be a close friend of mine, the sculptor Mel Edwards,” Dawoud wrote. “Both through Ana and through my own research and Valerie Cassel Oliver along with Omilade Janine Bell of the Elegba Folklore Society in Richmond, I was able to immerse myself in the history in an immediate and physical sense. It’s important to me to have a knowing sense of the place where I intend to make my work before beginning. It helps to steep me mentally and psychically in the experience of the place as well to remind me exactly where I am. It also gives the work a level of integrity that I feel is important, that can only come from spending time in a place and connecting and forming community with others who are also deeply invested in uncovering this history.”

Asked if the shooting for “Stony the Road” was significantly different from his work on “In This Here Place” and “Night Coming Tenderly, Black,” Dawoud wrote, “The challenge was fundamentally the same, to visually re-imagine the landscape of place and history through the medium and materials that I use to make my work. The most significant difference in photographing on the trail was that the approximately three-mile undisturbed length of the trail that still exists was the most abbreviated landscape of any that I had previously photographed on, which created the challenge of how to reinvent the description of that abbreviated space from photograph to photograph.”

And then I asked him what it is has been like to grow up Black in America. 

“I guess you could say that as a Black person in America I have PhD in Structural Racism, having experienced its effects directly through most of my life, from childhood to adulthood. Racism fundamentally shapes the social landscape that Black people inhabit,” according to Dawoud. “The reason it does begins with the institution of slavery, which Richmond played a very significant role in. The reverberations of Black degradation and human contempt that began in slavery continues very much to this day. The writer and cultural theorist Christina Sharpe, who contributed to my exhibition catalogue ‘Elegy’ has written about the institution of slavery and all the social traumas and injustices that continue to unfold from it as a ‘wake’ that continues to ripple out into our society, impacting countless aspects of sociopolitical life in America. Slavery is inherently a part of America’s DNA, and racism is and will continue to be its enduring legacy.” 

Finally, and more than somewhat naively, I asked, “Can art redeem us and make us better as a people, and help eliminate racial prejudice?” 

To which, Dawoud Bey responded: “Art can make us more reflective as a people, more alert to those things that we might not otherwise consider. I do believe that art has the capacity to reshape the world, one person at a time. I think it would be simplistic to think it can eliminate racism, but it can certainly make one more alert to things you might otherwise be ignoring. The human challenge is what we each choose to do with that. It’s the artist’s role to raise the questions or the history, to be the provocateur. I think James Baldwin states it best when he said, ‘The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.’”

This is the perfect juncture in Virginia’s history for every student in the Commonwealth to visit this exhibit and understand the unblemished truth about the enslavement of Africans. There was no upside to it as some governors have suggested. And other elected leaders, who have tried to rewrite history texts that essentially echo the false narrative of “the lost cause,” are simply spoon-feeding lies, swaddled in dung, to the young. “Elegy” by Dawoud Bey “illuminates the darkness” and “blazes roads through that vast forest.”