Home › Upcoming Exhibitions › Dawoud Bey: Material Histories, Living Landscapes

Black and White installation shot of film projection in gallery

Installation view of Dawoud Bey: Stony the Road at Sean Kelly, New York, January 10 – February 22, 2025, Photography: Adam Reich, Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York.

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Dawoud Bey: Material Histories, Living Landscapes

Opening July 24, 2026

Located on Level 2, Murray Frum Gallery, #249   

Exclusive Members' Access* starts from 5 PM on Jul 24–26
Annual Passholder and Public Access starts Jul 28

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*For Admirer level and up

 

Admission is always FREE for AGO Members, AGO Annual Passholders & Ontarians under 25, and Indigenous Peoples. Learn more.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

From acclaimed American artist Dawoud Bey comes a meditation on the tenuous relationships between North American landscapes and Black diasporic experiences.

This installation features a selection of images from the artist's three landscape-based projects: In This Here Place (2019), Stony the Road (2023), and Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017). The centrepiece of this installation is 350,000 (2023): a two-channel video that reimagines the journey made by 350,000 enslaved Africans along the Richmond Slave Trail between 1830 and 1860. These works come to the AGO on loan from the Rennie Collection in Vancouver. 

For this presentation, as part of the 2026 Toronto Biennial of Art, Bey worked with Curator Allison Glenn to conceive of the installation as a site-specific work, reflecting on the core curatorial framework of rupture as a generative force. Presented in dialogue with African artworks and objects from the AGO’s Frum Collection, four additional sculptures were selected by Bey to be included in this presentation, visually and historically developing a call and response between West African histories in the United States and Canada and those held in Nigeria, Ghana, and the Kongo—between the arrival and the departure, and the historical rupture manifested by the Middle Passage. These four works continue the narrative which Bey charts with his monumental photographic works, visually representing the enduring dialogues between North America and Africa.

Dawoud Bey: Material Histories, Living Landscapes provides a space for contemplating the enduring legacies of history in the contemporary moment. Presented at the AGO, in partnership with the Toronto Biennial of Art 2026, this exhibition is curated by Allison Glenn, Curator of the 2026 Toronto Biennial of Art, and will be on view through spring 2027.

 

Toronto Biennial of Art, Sept 26 - Dec 20, 2026

 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

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 (2020–2022), organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. 

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