Dawoud Bey to Deliver Mandy and Cliff Einstein Visiting Artist Lecture at Otis College

The groundbreaking artist and MacArthur Fellow will engage Otis photography students following his public lecture

Otis College of Art and Design’s Undergraduate Fine Arts Department will present the Mandy and Cliff Einstein Visiting Artist Lecture featuring artist Dawoud Bey on Thursday, February 20, 2025 at 7:00 p.m.

Bey will be joined by Otis College Provost Colette Veasey-Cullors for an engaging talk centered around Bey’s construction of history and memory 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.

Registration for the lecture is now open. The event, which is free and open to the public, will be held in The Forum of Otis College’s Goldsmith campus at 9045 Lincoln Boulevard in Los Angeles. 

During his visit, Bey will also spend time with Otis students. The intimate engagement between visiting artists and students is a distinctive hallmark of Otis’s Einstein Visiting Artist Lecture series. Fine Arts students developing photography-based practices will especially benefit from dedicated time with Bey, who has a long history as an educator.

About Dawoud Bey

Based in Chicago, Dawoud Bey was born in 1953 in Queens, New York. Celebrated for his rich, psychologically compelling portraits, Bey explores in his work a range of formal and material methodologies to create images and projects that connect deeply with the communities he photographs.

Bey came to attention with Harlem, U.S.A. (1975-1979) a visual journey through the iconic neighborhood that, in 1979, also comprised his first solo exhibition at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Since then, Bey’s photographic and social practice—he is highly regarded as an educator as well as a photographer—has been defined by the empathy he brings to his subjects and the complexity with which he depicts them. In succeeding decades and successive bodies of work, Bey has moved from working “in the streets” with a small, hand-held 35mm camera to creating more formally structured portraits using a tripod mounted 4 x 5 camera and the monumental 20 x 24 Polaroid view camera.

Bey’s conceptual and material evolution is, in part, a desire to find other ways of making his work within the context of his community and museum-based projects. Bey has pioneered programs that redefine how artists engage with institutions, while striving to make those spaces more accessible to the communities they serve. Class Pictures (2002-2006) expands upon a series of portraits the artist first created during a residency in 1992 at the Addison Gallery of American Art at the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. In this series Bey collaborated with young people and institutions throughout the United States. These striking, large-scale color portraits of students depict teenagers from a range of economic, social, and ethnic backgrounds, creating a diverse collection of portraits of a generation that challenge teenage stereotypes.

Recent bodies of work focus on the construction of history and memory. The Birmingham Project (2013) memorializes the lives of six young African American children killed in the bombing of the 1963 Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama and its aftermath; for Harlem Redux (2014–2017), Bey revisited the neighborhood to witness an urban landscape dramatically transformed by gentrification; and in Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017) Bey focused on architecture and landscape to visualize the historical subject of the Underground Railroad. Bey continues his visualization of collective experience and history, using photography as a vehicle to make them resonant in the contemporary moment.

Bey holds a Master of Fine Arts from Yale University School of Art and is currently Professor of Art and a former Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago. In 2017 Bey was awarded the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship. He is also the recipient of fellowships from United States Artists, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, amongst other honors. In 2020, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art opened a major retrospective exhibition of Bey’s work, which also traveled to the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. In 2022, the Grand Rapids Art Museum organized the two-person exhibition Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue, which traveled to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. In 2024, Bey was awarded membership to the Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Bey’s work is featured in numerous publications and is the subject of numerous monographs and publications, including Class Pictures (Aperture, 2007), Harlem, USA (Yale University Press, 2012), Picturing People (Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 2012), and Dawoud Bey: The Birmingham Project (Birmingham Museum of Art, 2013). In 2018 a major 40-year retrospective publication, Dawoud Bey: Seeing Deeply, was published by the University of Texas Press. In 2020 Yale University Press and SFMOMA published the monograph Dawoud Bey: Two American Projects.

Bey’s work has been included in important solo and group exhibitions worldwide and is included in the permanent collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, the High Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Tate Modern, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and other museums internationally.

About the Mandy and Cliff Einstein Visiting Artist Series

Funded through a generous gift from Mandy and Cliff Einstein, the Mandy and Cliff Einstein Visiting Artist Lecture Series provides Otis College students an opportunity to learn and engage directly with major figures in the art world today. Invited artists spend time with Otis students and give a free public lecture. Past guests have included Doug Aitken, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Theaster Gates, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Edgar Heap of Birds, Shirin Neshat, Jeffrey Vallance, Kara Walker, Zoe Whitley, and Anicka Yi. 

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