St. Paul’s Racial Justice and Healing (RJH) Team invites you to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) on Tuesday, February 13th, 2024 at 10:30 a.m. for a special tour of the Dawoud Bey: Elegy exhibition led by Ms. Valerie Cassel Oliver, VMFA’s Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. Ms. Cassel Oliver is the curator of the Elegy exhibition and personal friend of the renowned photographer Dawoud Bey. Those who wish to are invited to stay for a group lunch (at individual expense) after the tour around 12:00 p.m. at VMFA’s Best Café to share reflections on the exhibit. This free tour is limited to 25 participants and registration is required. In addition, free VIP tickets are available for those who wish to see the exhibit but cannot join us on February 13th due to scheduling constraints. Please register to reserve a spot for the Feb. 13th St. Paul’s tour (with waitlist option) or to request a free VIP ticket to attend the exhibit at another time.
Elegy is of special interest as includes photographs and a short film that feature the Richmond Trail of Enslaved Africans. RJH is currently working on developing a faith-based formation program around slavery and systemic racism focusing on the Trail as part of our new initiative “Telling the Truth: A Program on Faith and Race in Richmond.”
Dawoud Bey
Since the mid-1970s, contemporary American artist Dawoud Bey (b. 1953) has worked to expand upon what photography can and should be. He has created poignant meditations on visibility, power, and race. Bey chronicles communities and histories that have been largely underrepresented or even unseen, and his work lends renewed urgency to an enduring conversation about what it means to represent America with a camera.
Mesmerizing and evocative, Dawoud Bey: Elegy, an exhibition of 42 photographs and two film installations, at the VMFA contemplates the harrowing journeys and human realities of the Virginia slave trail as well as Louisiana plantations, and Ohio’s Underground Railroad. The exhibition premiers photographs taken in Richmond and commissioned by the VMFA. The photographs taken for this commission, entitled Stony the Road, which takes viewers to the historic trail of the enslaved in Richmond where Africans arrived in bondage at the Manchester Docks to an unknown land and were walked into enslavement. The first film installation in the exhibit, 350,000, evokes the 350,000+ men, women, and children sold from Richmond’s auction blocks at the Manchester Docks between 1830 and 1860. Dawoud Bey: Elegy was organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.
Valerie Cassel Oliver
Valerie Cassel Oliver is the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Prior to this position, she spent sixteen years at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas, where she was senior curator. She was also worked at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and as a program specialist at the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2000, she was one of six curators selected to organize the Biennial for the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
While at VMFA, Cassel Oliver has organized several special exhibitions including Tree of Life: Art from the African American South (2019), The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse (2021) and Isaac Julien: Lessons of the Hour—Frederick Douglass (2022). Her latest special exhibition is Dawoud Bey: Elegy.