Currently on view at the New Orleans Museum of Art, the photography exhibit “Dawoud Bey: Elegy” follows the movement of Africans into and out of American enslavement. In large-scale black-and-white landscape photos, Bey travels the Richmond (Va.) Slave Trail, Louisiana plantations, and the final miles of the Underground Railroad in Ohio – a story that follows the enslaved peoples’ arrival into bondage, their forced agricultural labor, and then their perilous journey north to freedom.
Organized by Valerie Cassel Oliver, a curator at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the exhibit also features two video pieces, and the eerie audio soundtrack of one — a three-screen color survey of slave cabins at the Evergreen Plantation in Edgard – continuously echoes through the galleries.
Read my October 19 Times-Picayune | New Orleans Advocate story here. Listen to a podcast interview with Brian Piper, NOMA’s Freeman Family Curator of Photographs, Prints, and Drawings, here. A Historic New Orleans Collection blog post about Bey’s Prospect.5 installation is here. Images accompanying the podcast interview are below.
Podcast note: After our interview, Brian reached out to add an additional thought to the sequence where we discussed the conversation that local audiences can have with Bey’s images.
“When you asked generally about what people here in New Orleans would get from having it presented here, I might have emphasized too strongly the opportunity for descendants of enslaved communities to draw connections from this work. That is important and I hope it is rewarding for people,” he wrote. “But if you don’t mind I’d really like to foreground the idea that I think it is important for all New Orleanians, and all Louisianans to see these works, and to hopefully think about their own connections to those histories – the history of enslavement in the United States – and the persistence of history in landscape; as well as through lines from the past to the present day. “
“Dawoud Bey: Elegy” is on view through January 4, 2026.
