American artist Dawoud Bey joins Toronto Biennial of Art curator Allison Glenn in conversation in Baillie Court to mark the opening of the new exhibition, Dawoud Bey: Material Histories, Living Landscapes. AGO Curator Julie Crooks will moderate.

Featuring a film and 23 photographs, in dialogue with four African sculptures from the AGO Collection, Bey worked with Curator Allison Glenn to conceive of an installation that furthers the 2026 Toronto Biennial’s thematic exploration of disruption as a generative force. 

A native of Queens, New York, Bey grew up in Civil Rights-era America, and his works continue to bring the past into the present. “How can one reimagine and visualize African American history and make that history resonate in the contemporary moment?” says Bey. 

Opening July 24, 2026, Dawoud Bey: Material Histories, Living Landscapes is presented at the AGO, in partnership with the Toronto Biennial of Art, as part of its 2026 edition, entitled Things Fall Apart. 

ABOUT DAWOUD BEY 
Born in Queens, New York, in 1953, groundbreaking American artist and MacArthur Fellow Dawoud Bey examines the Black past and present. He is a critic and alumnus at Yale University and is Professor Emeritus at Columbia College, Chicago. His photographs and film installations engage the oft-disappeared histories of the Black presence in America. Bey began his career as a photographer in 1975 with a series of photographs entitled “Harlem, U.S.A.” that were exhibited to critical acclaim in his first solo exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. His work has since been the subject of numerous major museum and gallery exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe, with works held in numerous public collections. Recent solo museum exhibitions include Street Portraits at the Denver Art Museum (November 2024), and Dawoud Bey: An American Project (2020–22), organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. 

ABOUT ALLISON GLENN  
A New York-based curator and writer focusing on the intersection of art and public space, Glenn has been devoted to realizing ambitious and experimental exhibitions and site-specific artist projects with artists working across the globe. She is Curator of the 2026 Toronto Biennial of Art, opening September 26, 2026. 

She is one of the curators of Centro América Red de Arte (CARA), opening in Guatemala City. Previous curatorial roles include Artistic Director of The Shepherd and Curator of Special Projects for Untitled Miami Beach 2025, Co-Curator of Counterpublic Triennial 2023, Visiting Curator at University of Tulsa, Senior Curator at New York’s Public Art Fund, and Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.  

ABOUT JULIE CROOKS  
The AGO Curator of Arts of Global Africa and the Diaspora, Crooks has curated exhibitions for many organizations, including BAND (Black Artists Networks in Dialogue) and the Royal Ontario Museum’s Of Africa project. She holds a PhD from the Department of History of Art and Archaeology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK. Crooks’s area of specialty is vernacular photography of West Africa and the diaspora. 

ABOUT THE TORONTO BIENNIAL OF ART 
A twelve-week event every two years, the Biennial commissions artists to create new works for a city-wide exhibition in dialogue with Toronto’s diverse local contexts, with the mission to make contemporary art accessible to everyone. Year-round public and learning programs bridge Biennials and invite intergenerational audiences to explore the ideas that inspire our events. Each Biennial connects people to spark meaningful dialogues and imagine new futures by building on past editions and offering new ways of seeing and listening.