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.

The first work that inspired him.

Walker Evans’s “42nd Street” (1929).

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.

A work he returns to again and again.

Alice Neel’s “The Black Boys” (1967).

I never tire of looking at this painting. I’m struck by how Neel used architecture and spatial geometry to contextualize her subjects. I also love her attention to the idiosyncrasies of a person’s gestures; it lends a quality of individuality, which is something I’m contending with in my own work. The sense that we’re seeing some aspect of the inner person is fundamental to a good portrait. In this painting, the patience and world-weariness of the two young boys and their gaze directed toward Neel — and more importantly, the viewer — provide that. Neel brought such formal invention and compassionate looking to her work. These are things I’m seeking in my photographs: to give everyday African Americans a heightened presence. Whether as a painting or as a photograph, a portrait is the result of a highly collaborative process, and I feel like I understand how [“The Black Boys”] was made when I look at it. This work became an affirmation of my own.

A new work of his own that he’s excited about.

“Untitled (Leaves and James River)” (2023).

I try to block out the present and bring the viewer into spaces of history in my ongoing landscape-based series [“Stony the Road,” which started in 2023]. A lot of horror is embedded in the American landscape. We need to think about that history in order to honestly assess both where we as a country come from and where we are. This photograph was made on Virginia’s Richmond Slave Trail, where upward of 350,000 Africans were walked into slavery. It is sacred ground, and holds a history well worth remembering. I want my work to provide a pathway into that remembering.

This interview has been edited and condensed.