NEW ORLEANS, LA.- The New Orleans Museum of Art opens the highly anticipated exhibition Dawoud Bey: Elegy, on view at the museum September 26, 2025—January 4, 2026. A profound exploration of early experiences of African Americans in the United States, the groundbreaking survey, organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, marks the comprehensive exhibition of three photographic series and two film installations by renowned contemporary artist Dawoud Bey.

“We are honored to present this important exhibition, which asks us to consider art’s vital role in imagining our past, present, and future,” said Susan M. Taylor, The Montine McDaniel Freeman Director of NOMA. “The museum has a longstanding commitment to affirming photography’s role as a fine art, and Elegy offers the opportunity to present an expanded look at the work of an artist already represented in NOMA’s permanent collection.”

Elegy chronicles Bey’s radical shift from portraiture and street photography to meditations on history and landscape. The historically grounded images included in the exhibition spur moving and visceral experiences, inviting visitors to become active participants within Bey’s immersive compositions. From the historic Richmond Slave Trail, where enslaved Africans were marched towards auction blocks, to the plantations of Louisiana where enslaved people lived and labored, to the last miles of the Underground Railroad in Ohio, a route fugitive slaves traveled in their quest for freedom, Bey’s powerful images evoke both factual and imagined realities.

The exhibition marks the first time Bey’s In This Here Place series—created in Louisiana—will be on view in full in the state alongside two other important bodies of history-based work.

“I’m really heartened that Elegy is opening in New Orleans at NOMA,” said artist Dawoud Bey. “It’s always meaningful when the history-based work that I am doing can be seen in the region where the work was made, creating an intimate and immediate conversation about place and history.”

The most comprehensive presentation of Bey’s landscape photography to date, Elegy is organized by Valerie Cassel Oliver, the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition features over 40 gelatin silver print photographs and two immersive film installations that originate from three distinct series—Stony the Road (2023), In This Here Place (2019) and Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017). Bey’s evolution from portraiture to landscape serves as a testament to the power of art in retelling history and encouraging dialogue, transporting viewers to sites in Virginia, Louisiana, and Ohio that present profound repositories of collective memory and witnesses to American history.

“Bey is one of the most important photographers working today,” said Brian Piper, Freeman Family Curator of Photographs, Prints, and Drawings at NOMA. “With works created in Louisiana, Virginia, and Ohio, each project in this exhibition reflects Bey’s in-depth research, his unique perspective, and his skill as an image-maker, prompting visitors to consider how history remains present in our contemporary world.”

Elegy opens with the photographic series Stony the Road (2023). Named after a line in the Black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the series visualizes the nearly three-mile-long Richmond Slave Trail, beginning at Manchester Docks and running alongside the James River in Richmond. This still-visible foot path served as the epicenter of the domestic slave trade where Africans arrived in bondage.

The exhibition also includes the related film 350,000 (2023). Produced in collaboration with cinematographer Bron Moyi, the work serves as a poignant reminder of the more than 350,000 men, women, and children sold into bondage in Richmond between 1830 and 1860. The film’s soundtrack, designed with Dr. E. Gaynell Sherrod, Professor of Dance and Choreography at Virginia Commonwealth University, was produced by recording interpretive dancers’ intonations and movements.

The second series of works in the exhibition, In This Here Place (2019), meditates on Black life and labor focusing solely on spaces and structures inhabited by enslaved people on plantations and along the Mississippi River in Louisiana. Bey’s photographs of these sites elucidate profound historical memories that remain embedded in the landscape and invite reflection upon our shared American past and contemporary moment.

Bey’s In This Here Place series is accompanied by a related three-screen video installation, entitled Evergreen (2021). Created in collaboration with vocalist and composer Imani Uzuri, Evergreen imparts a moving human presence to the otherwise uninhabited landscapes visible on Louisiana’s Evergreen Plantation, the only plantation in the Deep South that features original slave cabins in a historically accurate arrangement.

The exhibition concludes with Bey’s earliest series of landscape photographs, Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017), titled after a line from Langston Hughes’s poem “Dream Variations”. This selection of photographs, taken around Cleveland and Hudson, Ohio, imagines sites and pathways traveled by fugitives as they made their way along the last stages of the Underground Railroad.

Here, Bey underscores the perilous circumstances and uncertain scenes that African Americans fleeing bondage may have encountered on their flights to self-emancipation. Here, Bey’s photographs of open farmland and tight brush, darkened homes and unwelcoming terrain, are rendered in rich, incredibly dark tones, underscoring the uncertain, invisible route to freedom under the cover of night.

“The narrative arc as presented through the photographic lens of Dawoud Bey is a deeply moving visual poem steeped in history and conceptual resonance,” said Valerie Cassel Oliver, Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. “Elegy will impact visitors and provide an unflinching look into the history of African Americans in this country as well as the enduring legacies of their experience.”