Dawoud Bey’s ‘Material Histories, Living Landscapes’ Traces Black Diasporic Histories Through North American Landscapes

Dawoud Bey’s exhibition ‘Material Histories, Living Landscapes’ is now on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, where it brings together photography, video and African objects to examine the relationships between North American landscapes and Black diasporic experiences. Presented in partnership with the Toronto Biennial of Art 2026, the exhibition remains on view through July 4, 2027, in the AGO’s Level 2 Murray Frum Gallery.

The installation includes images from two of Bey’s three landscape-based projects: ‘In This Here Place’ (2019) and ‘Stony the Road’ (2023). The works address histories that are often absent from conventional landscape imagery, connecting place to the legacies and continuing presence of Black communities across North America.

An image from Bey’s ‘Night Coming Tenderly, Black’ (2017), ‘Untitled #25 (Lake Erie and Sky)’, serves as an establishing image for the presentation. By locating the project in Ontario, the work anchors the exhibition’s historical and geographic concerns in the region where it is being shown. Bey’s ‘Stony the Road’ was commissioned by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, while ‘In This Here Place’ was commissioned by Prospect New Orleans. ‘Night Coming Tenderly, Black’ was commissioned by FRONT Triennial.

The exhibition’s centrepiece is ‘350,000’ (2023), a two-channel video that reimagines the journey of 350,000 enslaved Africans along the Richmond Slave Trail between 1830 and 1860. The work extends Bey’s engagement with historical memory through moving images, using the landscape as a site where forced movement, absence and historical transmission remain present. The works in the exhibition come to the AGO on loan from the Rennie Collection in Vancouver.

For the Toronto presentation, Bey worked with Allison Glenn, curator of the 2026 Toronto Biennial of Art, to conceive the installation as a site-specific work. The presentation responds to the curatorial framework of rupture as a generative force and places Bey’s works in dialogue with African artworks and objects from the AGO’s Frum Collection. Four additional sculptures selected by Bey develop a visual and historical call-and-response between West African histories in the United States and Canada and objects connected to Nigeria, Ghana and the Kongo.

Born in Queens, New York, in 1953, Bey examines the Black past and present through photography and film installations. He began his career in 1975 with ‘Harlem, U.S.A.’, a series first shown in a solo exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. His work has since been presented in major museum and gallery exhibitions in the United States and Europe. Bey is a MacArthur Fellow, a critic and alumnus of Yale University, and Professor Emeritus at Columbia College, Chicago. His recent solo museum exhibitions include ‘Street Portraits’ at the Denver Art Museum in 2024 and ‘Dawoud Bey: An American Project’, organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art from 2020 to 2022.