History Reconsidered: Reimagining History through Photography

Join Aperture and the Chicago Humanities Festival for an illuminating dialogue between artists Dawoud Bey and Kelli Connell, moderated by Natasha Egan, on the occasion of the release of Dawoud Bey: Elegy and Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis.

MacArthur Fellow and Professor Emeritus of Photography at Columbia College Chicago, Dawoud Bey is one of the most celebrated photographers in American history. Fellow photography colleague Kelli Connell is an artist who investigates sexuality, gender, identity, and the relationship between photographer and subject. Natasha Egan, Executive Director at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, moderates a discussion for Chicago Humanities on reengaging with and reimagining history through photography. Both Dawoud Bey: Elegy and Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis draw on references from their latest books that span their recent work and present how photos help us reconsider our perceptions of history.

The conversation will be followed by a book signing. Advance registration is required. Please purchase tickets here.

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Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis

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Dawoud Bey: Elegy

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Dawoud Bey (born in New York, 1953) is an artist and MacArthur Fellow whose work examines the Black past and present. His photographs and film installations have been exhibited widely in museums and galleries throughout the United States and Europe. His work has been the subject of three major museum retrospectives, most recently Dawoud Bey: An American Project organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. His exhibition Elegy was on view at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts through February 2024.

Kelli Connell (born in Oklahoma City, 1974) is an artist whose work investigates sexuality, gender, identity, and photographer-sitter relationships. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Museum of Fine Arts Houston, among others. Connell has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, MacDowell, PLAYA, Peaked Hill Trust, LATITUDE, Light Work, and the Center for Creative Photography. Connell is an editor at Skylark Editions and a professor at Columbia College Chicago.

Since 2011, Natasha Egan has served as the executive director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago, where she was previously the associate director and curator since 2000. She has organized over fifty exhibitions with a focus on contemporary Asian art and artists concerned with societal issues, such as the environment, war, and economics. Egan was a guest curator for the 2010 FotoFest Biennial in Houston, the curator for the United States pavilion at the 2016 Dubai Photo Exhibition, and a guest curator for the 2019 Lianzhou Foto Festival in China.

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Image: Dawoud Bey, Untitled (James River), 2023; from the series Stony the Road, gelatin-silver print. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of Mrs. Alfred duPont, by exchange. Image © Dawoud Bey