American photographer Dawoud Bey wants the subjects of his portraits to possess "the power to look, to assert oneself, to meet the gaze of the viewer. . . to reclaim their right to look, to see, and to be seen." In the exhibition Dawoud Bey: Portraits 1975-1995, the Walker Art Center presents a 20-year survey comprised of more than 90 images focusing on the artist's developments in the genre of portraiture between 1975 and 1995. The exhibition examines Bey's move from the traditional format of black-and-white silver prints to his fascination with the possibilities of large-scale color Polaroid film. A highlight will be his portraits of area teens who participated in a summer class during a monthlong artist-in-residence project. Organized by Walker Adjunct Curator Kellie Jones, the exhibition will be on view September 17 - December 10, 1995.

Bey will participate in an opening-day dialogue with Jones at 3 pm Sunday, September 17. A reception for the artist featuring Afro-Cuban drumming by Wallace Hill and D.R.U.M.P.A.C. take place following the dialogue, from 4:30-6:30 pm in the Cowles Conservatory in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. Additional related programs include a course tracing African-American imagery in the history of photography; gallery talks by teens who attended Bey's summer class; and a reading by author and educator Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot. (A complete listing follows.)

Born in Queens, New York, in 1953, Bey's earliest photographic explorations evolved into a five-year project documenting the people and streets of Harlem. Entitled Harlem USA (1975-1979), the series is a collective portrait of a place and its inhabitants, very much in the documentary tradition of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and photographers such as Margaret Bourke-White and Walker Evans. But these works also draw on the more personal images made by African-American photographers Roy DeCarava and James Van DerZee. Like DeCarava, Bey has familial links to the locale, but like Van DerZee he is an African-American constructing his own official images of this renowned metropolis. The series was shown at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979, Bey's first solo exhibition.

For most of the 1980s Bey continued working within the tradition of "street photography," traversing the byways of largely northern cities--Syracuse, and Rochester, New York; Washington, D.C.; and New York City--and recording people in urban landscapes. While in the early 1980s space and architecture were foregrounded, eventually the figure returned as the main focus in Bey's images.

By the late 1980s Bey found himself becoming self-conscious about his position as a photographer in often depressed communities. He felt he was taking a lot from his subjects and wanted to find a way to return their generosity. He says, "I began to feel I wanted to have a more sustained contact with the people I was photographing. And I also wanted to be able to make the process more reciprocal; to create some kind of dialogic space within the act of making photographs of people that allowed the subject to both confirm my intentions and also be able to be in possession of this image I was making of them." Discarding his standard 35mm equipment, Bey began working with a 4-by-5-inch view camera, setting it up on a tripod--hood and all--in the street. Using Polaroid technology, he was able to give a photograph to each of his subjects instantaneously and still have a usable negative to print from. From 1988 to 1990, he developed this process and style, resulting in a hybrid between street photography and portraiture--a type of formal outdoor portrait.

While Bey's street portraits are chance encounters, his recent color studio portraits with the 20-by-24-inch Polaroid camera allow more sustained engagement with his subjects. With many of these pieces he uses multiple photographs to create a single work. In his double portraits, or diptyches, the subject is presented in two very different ways. In one half of the image, the subject's eyes are averted from the camera; in the other, the subject's gaze is intently engaged with the act of being photographed with the artist as observer. The sum of these private and public images is a complex and powerful composite likeness. Bey has continued working in this format, expanding the portraits to three-, six-, and eight-paneled pieces. The majority of Bey's models are teenagers, and through them he documents American youth culture, urban style paraded in clothing, gesture, and body language. His subjects use fashion and their own bodies to construct places of personal power. Bey has commented, "My use of color has to do with wanting to make an unabashedly lush and romantic rendering of people who seldom receive that kind of attention."

In conjunction with Dawoud Bey: Portraits 1975-1995, the Walker will publish a 128-page paperbound catalogue on Bey's work, the first major publication to survey his career. Featured will be essays by Kellie Jones; photography critic A.D. Coleman; and novelist-poet Jessica Hagedorn. Included will be an artist interview with Jock Reynolds, Director of the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts, and more than 50 color and black-and-white reproductions of Bey's work. ($29.95; $22.50 Walker members)

Following its presentation at the Walker, Dawoud Bey: Portraits 1975-1995 will travel to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York (January 12 - February 25, 1996); the Chicago Cultural Center (March 30 - May 26, 1996); and the El Paso Museum of Art (January 12 - March 9, 1997). For further information about how to bring this exhibition to your museum, contact Howard Oransky, Assistant to the Director for Program Planning, (612) 375-7564 with any questions. We look forward to hearing from you.

Support for Dawoud Bey: Portraits 1975-1995 is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the American Express Minnesota Philanthropic Program, and the Fredrikson & Byron Foundation on behalf of Fredrikson & Byron, P.A. Support for related programs and artist-in-residence activities is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Northwest Area Foundation, The McKnight Foundation, and the Polaroid Foundation.

Major support for Walker Art Center programs is provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, The Bush Foundation, The McKnight Foundation, Target Stores, Dayton's, and Mervyn's by the Dayton Hudson Foundation, the Northwest Area Foundation, the General Mills Foundation, the Institute of Museum Services, Burnet Realty, the American Express Minnesota Philanthropic Program, the Honeywell Foundation, Northwest Airlines, Inc., The Regis Foundation, The St. Paul Companies, Inc., the 3M Foundation, and the members of the Walker Art Center.

Related Events
Dawoud Bey: Portraits 1975-1995

Opening Weekend
Opening-Day Tour
Sunday, Septemer 17, 2 pm
Free with gallery admission
Walker Assistant Education Director Jackie Copeland and Teen Programs Coordinator Michelle Coffey will lead an opening-day tour of the exhibition. Included will be dialogues between Coffey and several teenagers who participated in the artist's monthlong residency.

Opening-Day Dialogue
Sunday, September 17, 3 pm ($4, $3)
Walker Art Center Adjunct Curator Kellie Jones and Dawoud Bey discuss the exhibition and the development of Bey's photography over the past two decades.

Opening-Day Reception in the Cowles Conservatory
Sunday, September 17, 4:30-6:30 pm
Free with gallery admission or dialogue ticket
The reception for the artist features Afro-Cuban drumming by Wallace Hill and D.R.U.M.P.A.C.

Class
Black Roots in Photography: Defining the African-American Experience
Thursdays, September 21-October 5, 6-8 pm Course Fee: $54 ($48.60)
Register by September 14 by calling the Walker box office at (612) 375-7622.
Walker Lecture Room
Offered in conjunction with the exhibition, this three-session class will explore how African Americans have defined their experience through photography-both as makers and as subjects. The presence of African-American imagery in the history of this medium and the achievements of early African-American photographers will be examined from artistic, political, and social perspectives. Surveying the work of such practitioners as James VanDerZee, Roy De Carava, Carrie Mae Weems, and Gordon Parks, the course will combine a historical account of significant black contributions to the medium with a look at contemporary image-making practices. This class is cosponsored with the Compleat Scholar program at the University of Minnesota.

Instructor Earcie Allen is a portrait and landscape photographer. Recently he co-taught a class for young students with Carrie Mae Weems that resulted in the exhibition Shades of Color at pARTs Gallery. Allen also serves as Community Programs Coordinator at the Walker.

Tour
Second Sunday Thematic Tour
Who Do You See?
Sunday, October 8
Focusing on portraiture in the Bey exhibition and in the permanent collection galleries, this tour explores how artists have portrayed themselves and others.

Family Programs
Free First Saturdays Are For Families!
Look At Me!
Saturday, October 7, 11 am-4 pm
Celebrate the portraits of Dawoud Bey and the relationships among people and their families. Learn how artists record a personality on film. Meet teenagers portrayed in Bey's photographs. Hear the sounds of the most popular music styles in Africa, and make a self-portrait keepsake to take home.

Performance: Shalita
11 am
Walker Auditorium
Masters of souskas, zouk, reggae, makosa, and other pop African styles, Joe Shalita and his band members are sure to get the crowd on its feet.

Drop-In Art Activity: The Story Within
12 noon-4 pm
Walker Art Lab
Create a portrait of yourself, using Polaroid photos and stories written on keepsake frames. Led by Jeremy Norton.

I've Got You Covered: Portraits on Film
12 noon and 2 pm
Walker Lecture Room
This program of films explores five very different portraits of people and animals, animated and otherwise. Includes Frank Film, Furies, Ghosts Before Breakfast, Kisha's Song, and Skyeboat for Biscuit. Screening time approximately 30 minutes.

Guided Tour For Families, 1 pm
Meet at the Walker Lobby Desk.
Explore the exhibition Dawoud Bey: Portraits 1975-1995 with teens who worked with the artist and are featured in the installation.

Guided Tour For Families, 2 pm
Meet at the Walker Lobby Desk.
Discover various ways artists have portrayed themselves, their families, and communities that are important to them on this tour that highlights portraiture in the Permanent Collection.

Free First Saturdays are made possible by Burnet Realty. Saturday family programming is made possible by the Northwest Area Foundation, Dayton's, The Medtronic Foundation, and the US WEST Foundation and the National Council of Jewish Women, St. Paul Section. Free First Saturdays are part of the Walker Art Center's "New Definitions/New Audiences" initiative. This museum-wide project to engage visitors in a reexamination of 20th-century art is made possible by the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund.

Artwork of the Month
The October artwork of the month is Brian and Paul (1993) by Dawoud Bey on view in Gallery A. Pick up a free family activity guide about this artwork in the gallery or at the Walker lobby desk.

Reading
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot
I've Known Rivers: Lives of Loss and Liberation
Friday, October 20, 7:30 pm $4 ($3)
Walker Lecture Room. A book signing follows in the lower lobby.
With a fine brush, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot paints intimate portraits of . . . loss and triumph, rage and love, blackness and sexuality, trauma and healing, and the challenging journeys of life. -Marion Wright Edelman

A portrait of Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot hangs among the many striking images in the exhibition Dawoud Bey: Portraits 1975-1995. The "real" Lawrence-Lightfoot, professor of education at Harvard University and author of Balm in Gilead, visits the Walker to read from her recent work, I've Known Rivers: Lives of Loss and Liberation. The literary equivalent of Bey's photographic documents, I've Known Rivers employs a kind of "human archaeology" to create portraits of the complex, nuanced lives of six middle-class African-Americans and their struggle to find equilibrium between black culture and mainstream America. Lawrence-Lightfoot has been the recipient of the Christopher Award for literary merit and humanitarian achievement, the MacArthur Award, and has been a Fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and at the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford University.

Gallery Talks
Portraits and Representation
Subjects Speaking
Raslyn Wooten and Alex Wong
Thursday, October 26, 6:30 pm Free Admission
Galleries A and B
The first of three informal gallery talks offered in conjunction with the exhibition, this presentation draws upon the experiences of two young Twin Citians and Walker Teen Programs Coordinator Michelle Coffey who, along with a dozen area teenagers, worked with Dawoud Bey during an artist-in-residence project this past summer. Bey's portraits of class participants will be included in the exhibition. Wooten and Wong will discuss how their initial ideas about the nature of photographic portraiture were tempered and refined while working with Bey. They will share their reactions to seeing themselves as the subjects of Bey's portraits.

Portraits in Jazz
Tim DuRoche and Gene Adams
Thursday, November 9, 6:30 pm Free Admission
Galleries A and B
Tim DuRoche of the Walker Performing Arts staff and jazz trumpeter Gene Adams present a collaborative lecture/performance in the galleries that looks at portraiture, history, and the image of jazz.

The third gallery talk will consider the genre of portraiture in photography. Details to be announced.

Performance
William Yang
Saturday, December 2, 8 pm
Ticket prices to be announced
Walker Auditorium
Taking the form of a living-room slide-show, Yang, an Australian photographer and performance artist, performs Sadness, a full-length monologue, with slides, concurrently dealing with his Chinese roots and with the death of many close friends from AIDS.