Contemporary Perspectives Lecture: Dawoud Bey in conversation with Allison Kemmerer

BU College of Fine Arts School of Visual Arts presents a conversation between artist Dawoud Bey and the Director of the Addison Gallery of American Art, Allison Kemmerer. Organized by MFA Print Media & Photography as part of the Contemporary Perspectives Lecture Series (CPLS) and the Tim Hamill Visiting Artist Series

Groundbreaking artist and MacArthur Fellow Dawoud Bey examines the Black past and present. His photographs and film installations have been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the United States and Europe. Bey’s work has been the subject of numerous solo museum exhibitions, including Dawoud Bey: An American Project organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2020-2022), and Elegy at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (2023-2024) and New Orleans Museum of Art (2024-2025). Bey was recently recognized by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2024) and has been the subject of several monographs, including Elegy (Aperture/VMFA, 2023), which chronicles Bey's history projects and landscape-based work. Bey lives and works in Chicago and New York. He is an alumnus of Yale University and is Professor Emeritus at Columbia College Chicago.

As the Addison’s Mary Stripp and R. Crosby Kemper Director, Allison provides creative vision for the museum--one that includes innovative exhibitions, diverse acquisitions, meaningful educational opportunities, and an enduring commitment to presenting the diversity of the American narrative and the richness of the human experience through art. With a curatorial focus on photography and contemporary art, she has organized numerous exhibitions for the Addison including: Mel Kendrick: Seeing Things in Things; Wayfinding: Contemporary Artists, Critical Dialogues, and the Sidney R. Knafel Map Collection; Contemplating the View: American Landscape Photographs; In Character: Artists’ Role Play in Photography and Video; In Focus: 75 Years of Collecting American Photography; and Reinventing the West: The Photographs of Ansel Adams and Robert Adams. Allison has authored essays for a number of museum publications, among them Mel Kendrick: Seeing Things in Things; The Irreverent Interlopings of Triple Candie, 2001-2016; Carroll Dunham Prints: A Catalogue Raisonné; Reinventing the West; Peter Sekaer: American Pictures; Richard Serra: Large Scale Prints; and Jennifer Bartlett: Early Plate Work. Allison oversees the museum’s Edward E. Elson Artist-in-Residence program and has worked with many artists on projects and exhibitions including, Dawoud Bey, Andrea Chung, Liz Collins, Wendy Ewald, Jim Hodges, Abelardo Morell, Laurel Nakadate, Laurie Simmons, and William Wegman. She received a BA from Boston College and an MA from Boston University. Prior to coming to the Addison Gallery of American Art in 1992, she was Acting Director of the Boston University Art Gallery.