Three of Dawoud Bey’s Favorite Artworks

In Solo Show, a new series from T Magazine, we ask Black artists to curate a list of three treasured works that they’ve encountered or made, and to reflect on how their practice connects to a broader art lineage.

In 2023, the artist Dawoud Bey, 71, first presented “Stony the Road,” a series of photographs, and a film, “350,000,” that focus on the Virginia terrain where many African captives first arrived in this country. Those works are now on view in New York for the first time, at Sean Kelly gallery. Here, Bey, whose 1988-91 street portraits of Black American subjects are simultaneously on view at the Denver Art Museum, discusses the works that have impacted how he depicts both everyday people and historical landscapes.

In 1975, I was just beginning my own serious pursuits as a photographer. I was spending a lot of time in museums and in the few galleries that exhibited photographs at that time in New York. I hadn’t attended art school yet, so I was in a process of self-education, trying to take in as much as I could. I probably first saw this Evans photograph at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Although it depicts a casual and momentary encounter between strangers, one Black [the subject] and one white [the photographer], the full weight of the Black woman’s regal presence gripped my attention. This was the first photograph by Evans that I saw that contained a Black subject, and in a distinctly urban environment — it seemed to embody everything I aspired to at that moment.