Dawoud Bey: Elegy

Cloth $65.00 (9781597115643) The Virginia Museum of Fine Art’s (VMFA) Elegy is an exhibition by MacArthur Fellow Dawoud Bey and curated by the incomparable Valerie Cassel Oliver. The circulation of these landscape photographs, presented as objective documentation, facilitated and encouraged an ideol...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:CAA.reviews (New York, N.Y.) N.Y.), 2024
Main Author: Williams, Sandy
Format: Review
Language:English
Subjects:
Centuries
Diptychs
Elegies
Emancipation of slaves
Museums
Narratives
Slavery
Trails
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Summary:Cloth $65.00 (9781597115643) The Virginia Museum of Fine Art’s (VMFA) Elegy is an exhibition by MacArthur Fellow Dawoud Bey and curated by the incomparable Valerie Cassel Oliver. The circulation of these landscape photographs, presented as objective documentation, facilitated and encouraged an ideology that supported the genocide and displacement of Indigenous Native American communities and sanctioned the theft of land by waves of white settlers. The emphasis on a landscape that bears the memory of human activity, but is absent of bodies, challenges our sense of time and enlists our imagination to discern what is “new” in the images and what has “always been here.” Through the title and the sonic composition of layered chains, chants, drums, and other sounds, the installation echoes and alludes to the three hundred fifty thousand enslaved men, women, and children who walked these same trails through Richmond and were sold at the Shockoe auction blocks from the 1830s until the end of the US Civil War in 1865.
ISSN:1543-950X
DOI:10.3202/caa.reviews.2024.47