Dawoud Bey’s powerful new installation traces the enduring presence of Black history across North American landscapes, inviting viewers to see memory, rupture, and resilience inscribed in the land itself.
15 July 2026
Acclaimed American artist Dawoud Bey returns with a profound new exhibition that transforms landscape into a site of historical reckoning. Opening at the Art Gallery of Ontario as part of the 2026 Toronto Biennial of Art, ‘Dawoud Bey: Material Histories, Living Landscapes’ brings together photography, moving image, and sculpture in a deeply resonant exploration of Black diasporic histories.
The exhibition unites works from Bey’s landmark series Night Coming Tenderly, Black, In This Here Place, and Stony the Road, alongside the immersive two-channel film 350,000 (2023), which reimagines the forced journey of enslaved Africans along Virginia’s Richmond Slave Trail. Rather than treating landscape as passive scenery, Bey reveals it as a living archive, carrying the traces of violence, displacement, resistance, and survival across generations.
Conceived in collaboration with curator Allison Glenn as a site-specific installation, the exhibition is presented in dialogue with four historic African sculptures from the AGO’s Frum Collection. This visual conversation forges powerful connections between West African cultural histories and their enduring legacies across North America, reflecting on rupture not simply as loss, but as a force capable of generating new narratives and relationships.
Thoughtful, poetic, and politically urgent, ‘Material Histories, Living Landscapes’ offers an essential encounter with one of contemporary photography’s most influential voices. On view at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto from 24 July 2026 through spring 2027, the exhibition invites audiences to reconsider how history inhabits place, and how landscapes continue to bear witness long after events have passed.
This exhibition is on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario until January 2027.
