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Class Pictures: Photographs by Dawoud Bey

Presented by Weatherspoon Art Museum at Weatherspoon Art Museum

June 15-September 7, 2008

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For the past fifteen years, Dawoud Bey has made striking, large-scale color portraits of students at high schools across the United States. Depicting teenagers from a wide economic, social, and ethnic spectrum, Bey creates compelling portraits of contemporary youth that transcend stereotypes. The forty photographs included in this exhibition are accompanied by personal statements that are alternately touching, humorous, and harrowing. Together the words and images in Class Pictures deepen our appreciation for young adults and the challenges they face in the twenty-first century. It is Bey's hope to create a “portrait of American youth in its various social and human dimensions. I believe that such a group of photographs —with the attendant texts—will constitute a significant record and examination of our time…Rather than viewing young people through a lens of social problematics that generalizes the individual, I intend to make a rich and complex description of these subjects.” Dawoud Bey (born 1953, New York) earned his MFA from Yale University School of Art and is professor of photography at Columbia College in Chicago. He has been featured in numerous exhibitions—including a mid-career survey at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in 1995—and has received several awards, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is represented by Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago and Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston. “Class Pictures: Photographs by Dawoud Bey” is organized by Aperture, a not-for-profit organization devoted to photography and the visual arts.