History and Memory in the Landscape: A Conversation with Dawoud Bey & Colette Veasey-Cullors

Join Otis College of Art and Design for an engaging conversation between two esteemed Aperture board members, the artist Dawoud Bey and Otis College Provost Colette Veasey-Cullors. A part of Otis’s Einstein Visiting Artist Lecture Series, this program will be centered around Dawoud Bey’s construction of history and his necessity to provoke a visual conversation about the past in the present moment. They will discuss how Bey uses the photographic medium as a “piece of the American fabric that is not always engaged or amplified in the Great American narrative,” a reimagining of history that centers and magnifies those unseen narratives and subjects while simultaneously engaging with the history of photography.

The event is free and open to the public. Registration for the lecture is now open. 

Related Items

Dawoud Bey: Elegy

Shop Now

—

Dawoud Bey (born in New York, 1953) has for decades made groundbreaking and evocative work about the histories of Black communities. His numerous honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. A major career retrospective of his work, An American Project, was co-organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2020–22). Bey holds an MFA from Yale University School of Art and is currently a critic at Yale and is professor emeritus at Columbia College, Chicago, where he taught since 1998. His books include Class Pictures (Aperture, 2007), Seeing Deeply (2018), Dawoud Bey on Photographing People and Communities (Aperture, 2019), and Street Portraits (2021). 

Colette Veasey-Cullors is a lifelong educator and a community-engaged photographic artist and mentor. She obtained her BFA in photography from the University of Houston and her MFA in photography from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She has exhibited her work throughout the United States, including the California African American Museum, Los Angeles, the African American Museum in Philadelphia, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Chattanooga African American Museum, Tennessee. Her work is included in the Smithsonian Institution’s permanent collection of the National Museum of African American History and Culture and in the institution’s Photographic History Collection of the National Museum of American History, both in Washington, DC. 

—
Image: Dawoud Bey, Irrigation Ditch, 2019; from Dawoud Bey: Elegy (Aperture, 2023). Image © Dawoud Bey