Dawoud Bey: Elegy

Dawoud Bey: Elegy features works by Dawoud Bey, whose practice in photography and film installation examines the histories of Black life in the United States through landscape rather than portraiture. The exhibition brings together over 40 gelatin silver print photographs and two immersive film installations from three series: Stony the Road (2023), In This Here Place (2019), and Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017). New Orleans Museum of Art, One Collins C. Diboll Circle, City Park, New Orleans, LA 70124. September 26, 2025 — Runs through January 4, 2026. Across the exhibition, Bey turns to sites in Virginia, Louisiana, and Ohio to consider enslavement, forced labor, and the routes of self-emancipation. His images of plantation grounds, the Richmond Slave Trail, and landscapes connected to the Underground Railroad use darkness, atmosphere, and stillness to evoke both documented history and imagined experience. The exhibition also includes the films 350,000 (2023), made with cinematographer Bron Moyi, and Evergreen (2021), created with vocalist and composer Imani Uzuri. Together, the photographs and films position landscape as a repository of memory, asking viewers to consider how histories of Black life remain embedded in the American terrain.