TORONTO.- Acclaimed American artist Dawoud Bey (b. 1953) returns to the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) this summer, with an installation considering the tenuous relationships between North American landscapes and Black diasporic experiences. Presented in partnership with the 2026 Toronto Biennial of Art, Dawoud Bey: Material Histories, Living Landscapes brings together 23 photographs and a film, in dialogue with four African sculptures from the AGO Collection. Curated by Allison Glenn, Curator of the 2026 Toronto Biennial of Art, this site-specific installation opens July 24, 2026, in the Murray Frum Gallery on Level 2.

A native of Queens, New York, Dawoud Bey grew up in Civil Rights-era America, and his works continue to bring the past into the present. “How can one reimagine and visualize African American history and make that history resonate in the contemporary moment?” says Bey.

For this presentation as part of the 2026 Toronto Biennial of Art, Bey worked with Curator Allison Glenn to conceive of an installation that furthers the Biennial’s thematic exploration of disruption as a generative force.

Greeting visitors to the exhibition from his series Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2016-17), is a large-scale reproduction of Untitled #25 (Lake Erie and the Sky) (2017). Part of a series in which Bey re-imagines rural Ohio landscapes as they would have appeared to enslaved people, moving along the Underground Railway in the dark, the image is all water and sky. Noticeably absent of any figures, the image links Bey’s exhibition to Toronto, itself once a destination on the Underground Railroad, and in its proximity to African Objects from the AGO collection suggests an extension of that historical journey across the Atlantic to West Africa.





“What Dawoud Bey’s monumental photographs, presented in situ at the AGO, enable us to do,” says Allison Glenn, Curator of the 2026 Toronto Biennial of Art, “is to visually represent the enduring dialogues between North America and Africa, and to consider the importance of global waterways to those dialogues. A call and response between West African histories in the United States and Canada, seen from the shores of the Great Lakes, this exhibition highlights the historical rupture made manifest by the Middle Passage.”

Tightly hung to magnify feelings of constraint, the exhibition features 23 photographs from Bey’s series In This Here Place (2019) and Stony the Road (2023). Acts of deep witnessing, these images document historical sites of enslavement and American landscapes through which Black bodies were forcibly moved. On loan from the Rennie Collection, these large gelatin silver prints - among them Branches in the Bayou (2020) and Untitled (Tangled Branches) (2020) - surround the viewer in lush vegetation, ghostly forms, and unease.

Artist Dawoud Bey says, "I hope that viewers will come to a deeper consideration of history and realize that history does not stay in the past, it very much informs and shapes the present as well."

At the centre of this installation, also on loan from the Rennie Collection, is the black and white two-channel video 350,000 (2023). Reimagining the journey made by 350,000 enslaved Africans along the Richmond Slave Trail between 1830 and 1860, Cinematographer Bron Moyi films from the perspective of the viewer, immersing them in dense foliage. The tension is amplified by a soundtrack of staccato breaths and body percussion, created in collaboration with choreographer and Virginia Commonwealth University Professor E. Gaynell Sherrod.

Born in Queens, New York in 1953, groundbreaking American artist and MacArthur Fellow Dawoud Bey examines the Black past and present. He is a critic and alumnus at Yale University and is Professor Emeritus at Columbia College, Chicago. His photographs and film installations engage the oft-disappeared histories of the Black presence in America. Bey began his career as a photographer in 1975 with a series of photographs entitled “Harlem, U.S.A.” that were exhibited to critical acclaim in his first solo exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. His work has since been the subject of numerous major museum and gallery exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe, with works held in numerous public collections. Recent solo museum exhibitions include Street Portraits at the Denver Art Museum (November 2024), and Dawoud Bey: An American Project (2020–2022), organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.