Free

On Saturday, March 2nd from 4:00 to 6:00 pm, please join Arcana: Books on the Arts for a book signing with Dawoud Bey to celebrate the publication of Elegy

If you cannot attend and would like to order a signed copy to have shipped or to pick up at Arcana, please place your order here.

Renowned for his Harlem street scenes and expressive portraits, Dawoud Bey continues his ongoing series on African American history focusing on the landscape to create a portrait of the early African American presence in the United States. Elegy brings together Bey’s three landscape series to date – “Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017)”, “In This Here Place (2021)”, and “Stoney the Road (2023)” – elucidating the deep historical memory still embedded in the geography of the United States. Bey takes viewers to the historic Richmond Slave Trail in Virginia, where Africans were marched onto auction blocks; to the plantations of Louisiana, where they labored; and along the last stages of the Underground Railroad in Ohio, where fugitives sought self-emancipation. Essays by the exhibition’s curator, Valerie Cassel Oliver, and scholars LeRonn P. Brooks, Imani Perry, and Christina Sharpe illuminate the work. By interweaving these bodies of work into an elegy in three movements, Bey doesn’t merely evoke history, he retells it through historically grounded images that challenge viewers to go beyond seeing and imagine lived experiences.

A brand new example additionally SIGNED by photographer Dawoud Bey.

Cover Image: Untitled (James River) from the series Stony the Road, 2023, Dawoud Bey (American, born 1953), gelatin silver print. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of Mrs. Alfred duPont, by exchange. Image © Dawoud Bey. Photograph of Dawoud Bey © Frank Ashman.