Class Pictures: Photographs by Dawoud Bey

January 10 - March 10, 2012

For fifteen years, Dawoud Bey created striking, large-scale color portraits of students at 17 high schools across the United States. Class Pictures: Photographs by Dawoud Bey brings together 27 of these images depicting youth from a wide economic, social, and ethnic spectrum. Intensely attentive to their poses and gestures, but also to the world in which they live, Bey has created a highly diverse group portrait of a generation that challenges stereotypes.

Class Pictures, organized by the Aperture Foundation, comes to Pittsburgh as the last stop in its national tour, which included the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the Milwaukee Art Museum, among others. This is the first solo exhibition in Pittsburgh by this Chicago-based, internationally-acclaimed artist.

Artist Lecture & Booksigning

Thursday, February 23, 2012, 6:30 p.m.

Free, Co-sponsored with Carnegie Museum of Art

CMA Auditorium, 4400 Forbes Avenue, Oakland

Since 1992 Dawoud Bey has completed a number of important collaborations involving teens, schools and cultural institutions. In this free lecture, the artist discusses these various collaborations within the context of his distinguished career as a photographer, teacher and writer.

Dawoud Bey received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University in 1993,  and is currently a professor of photography at Columbia College, Chicago. He has received awards and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and a 2011 Lucie Award in Portraiture.

Bey's work has also been featured in group exhibitions at institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo, Japan; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia. The Art Institute of Chicago and Yale University Press will publish Bey's Harlem, USA in May 2012 and the museum will mount an exhibition of that work this spring. His photographs are included in the permanent collections of many of these institutions as well as others throughout the United States and Europe.

Photo Credits (from left to right): Kevin, 2005 and Lauren, 2006 from the series Class Pictures, Courtesy of the artist.