Looking through the Lens of American History

Dawoud Bey is a Chicago-based photographer, celebrated for his rich, psychologically compelling portraits. Bey’s work explores a range of formal and material methodologies to create images and projects that connect deeply with the communities he photographs. He is currently professor of art and a former Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago. In 2017, Bey was awarded the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship. He is also the recipient of fellowships from United States Artists, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among other honors. In 2020, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art opened a major retrospective exhibition of Bey’s work which also traveled to the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. In 2022, the Grand Rapids Art Museum organized the two-person exhibition Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue, which will travel to the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles in the spring of 2023. Bey holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University School of Art.

Ming Smith is a New York-based photographer. An alumna of Howard University, she was the first female member to join Kamoinge, a collective of Black photographers in New York in the 1960s working to document Black life. Smith would go on to be the first Black woman photographer to be included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art. Smith was recently included in Soul of a Nation at Tate Modern in collaboration with the Brooklyn Museum, Crystal Bridges, and The Broad. She was also featured in the Brooklyn Museum’s We Wanted A Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85. Smith’s work is in the collections of MoMA, the Whitney Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, Virginia Museum of Fine Art, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture. She was included in MoMA’s 2010 seminal exhibition, Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography.

Jon Meacham is a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer. He is the author of New York Times bestsellers And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle; Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power; American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House; Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship; Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush; The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels; and His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope. He is a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University and a fellow of the Society of American Historians. Meacham lives in Nashville and Sewanee with his wife and children.