2023 Aperture Gala

Tuesday, October 3, 2023
6:30 p.m.

Location
Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Appel Room
New York City

Honoring Dawoud Bey
Photographer, Educator, and MacArthur Fellow

Cocktail attire

Cochairs

Agnes Gund
Elizabeth Ann Kahane
Cathy M. Kaplan
Dr. Kenneth Montague
Bob Rennie
Lisa Rosenblum

The Aperture Gala is our annual celebration that brings together an ardent community of artists, philanthropists, writers, editors, curators, collectors, gallerists, and other leaders in the field. The Gala is Aperture’s most significant fundraising event of the year, and the proceeds support our award-winning publications, educational initiatives, exhibitions, and public programming.

This year, we are delighted to honor the singularly influential photographer, educator, and MacArthur Fellow Dawoud Bey.

Buy Tickets

For more information, please contact the Gala office at Bowen & Co. 914.231.6180 / aperture@bowenandco.com

This year, we are delighted to honor the singularly influential photographer, educator, and MacArthur Fellow Dawoud Bey. As our editors wrote in Aperture magazine, Bey “began his creative life as a drummer, versed in the articulations and improvisations of jazz. Whether percussive or visual, Bey’s work is fine-tuned to the historic and quotidian rhythms of Black life. Since the mid-1970s, he has crafted disarmingly serene portraits and psychologically rich landscapes, moving between the side streets and thoroughfares of Harlem, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, and the dense, unmarked trails of the Underground Railroad. He offers clear-eyed views of America, past and present, buoyed, as always, by Black grace.”

We look forward to paying tribute to Dawoud Bey onstage at our new Gala venue, Jazz at Lincoln Center. Our Gala is a uniquely important opportunity for a community of people who appreciate why photographs matter to gather and, this year, to celebrate this beloved force in the field.

Honorees

Photo: Whitten Sabbatini

Groundbreaking American artist Dawoud Bey (born in Queens, 1953) has for decades made evocative work that mines the histories of marginalized Black communities. He began his career as a photographer in 1975 with the series Harlem, USA, later exhibited in his first one-person exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. Since that time, his work has been the subject of exhibitions at museums and galleries worldwide.

The artist’s most recent retrospective, Dawoud Bey: An American Project, organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, traveled to the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. His work has been the subject of several monographs, including a forty-year retrospective Seeing Deeply (2017) and Street Portraits (2021). Among his other titles are the Aperture publications Class Pictures (2007) and Dawoud Bey on Photographing People and Communities: The Photography Workshop Series (2019). In addition, his critical writings on contemporary art and photography have appeared in various publications. A forthcoming publication, Elegy, will bring together the history projects and landscape-based work Bey has made since 2012 and will accompany an exhibition later this year at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

Bey is the recipient of many honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the ICP Infinity Award, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Howard University.

Dawoud Bey holds a master of fine arts from Yale University School of Art. He is a professor of art and a former distinguished college artist at Columbia College Chicago, where he has taught since 1998.

Committees

Aperture wishes to thank the 2023 Gala Benefit Committee

Sarah Arison
Peter Barbur* and Tim Doody
Julie Bédard*
Lawrence and Elyse Benenson
Rebecca Bengal
Dawoud Bey*
Myriam Boulos
Kwame S. Brathwaite*
Allan Chapin* and Anna Nilsson
Christie’s
Sam Contis
S. B. Cooper* and R. L. Besson
Kate Cordsen* and Denis O’Leary
Angélica Dass
John Edmonds
Caryl Englander
Awol Erizku
Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood
Lauren Reiss Frank
LaToya Ruby Frazier
Mark Gimbel and Dede Welles
Elaine Goldman* and John Benis
Goldman-Sonnenfeldt Foundation
Hannah Gottlieb-Graham
Howard Greenberg
Agnes Gund
Sunil Gupta
Lyle Ashton Harris*
Melissa Harris
Terry Hermanson
Ronnie Heyman
Todd Hido
Allison and Keyes Hill-Edgar
Julie and Will Hobert
Michael Hoeh*
Ingram Content Group
Elizabeth* and William Kahane
Cathy M. Kaplan* and Renwick D. Martin
Darlene Kaplan and Steve Zuckerman
Tommy Kha
Justine Kurland
Gillian Laub
Judy and Leonard Lauder
Philippe Laumont*
Bonnie Lautenberg
Deana Lawson
An-My Lê
David Leven and Stella Betts
Mark and Elizabeth Levine
Marina and Andrew* Lewin
Talbot Logan and Bill Miller

Alison and Tim Lord
Sally Mann
Mary Manning
Ari Marcopoulos
Lindsay McCrum*
Ryan McGinley
Richard and Ronay Menschel
Joel Meyerowitz*
Richard Misrach
Tyler Mitchell
Dr. Kenneth Montague*
Philip Montgomery
Vik Muniz
Vasant Nayak* and Sheela Murthy
Dr. Stephen W. Nicholas* and Ellen Sargent
Helen Nitkin* and Joel Rosenkranz
Melissa* and James O’Shaughnessy
Claudia and Gunnar Overstrom
Phillips
Marnie S. Pillsbury
Betsy and Rob Pitts
Kristine Potter
Leigh Raiford
Wendy Red Star
Bob Rennie
Lisa Rosenblum*
Clifford Ross
Antwaun Sargent
Thomas R. Schiff* and Mary Ellen Goeke
Edwin Schlossberg
Sean Kelly Gallery
Lisa and Harry Segalas
Paul Mpagi Sepuya
Martha and Matthew Sharp
Shikeith
Laurie Simmons
The Susan S. & Kenneth L. Wallach Foundation
Hank Willis Thomas
Scott and Charlotte Tracy
Stephanie H. Tung
Colette Veasey-Cullors*
Lucinda Watson
Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb
Carrie Mae Weems and Jeffrey Hoone
William Wegman and Christine Burgin
Alan and Louise Weil
Casey* and Lauren Weyand
Whit Williams
Deborah Willis*
Yancey Richardson Gallery

*Aperture Trustee
List complete as of 07.25.2023