In honor of frieze's Vision and Justice Project, and its founder Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, artist Dawoud Bey and Leigh Raiford, chair of UC Berkeley’s African American Studies program, will be in conversation on Friday, May 7 at 3 PM.
Bey’s retrospective An American Project, currently on view at the Whitney Museum of Art, highlights the artist’s four-decade commitment to portraying the Black subject and African American history. Leigh Raiford is Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where her scholarship centers on issues of race, gender, justice and visuality. Leigh Raiford wrote about Bey’s The Birmingham Project for the 2016 “Vision and Justice” issue of Aperture Magazine. Works from this series are currently on view in Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America at the New Museum as well as the Whitney. This conversation will expand upon Bey and Raiford’s ongoing dialogue on the representation of blackness as an aesthetic and political act and the role that photography plays in visualizing history.