Kaatsbaan Cultural Park to Present A Conversation & Reception With Dawoud Bey

Kaatsbaan Cultural Park will present Dawoud Bey, acclaimed photographer and educator, in conversation with Sophie Landres, Curator and Exhibitions Manager of The Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz, at the Black Box Theater on Saturday, October 11 at 7:00 PM. Bey and Landres will discuss his much celebrated bodies of work beginning with the 2013 Birmingham Project up through his most recent 2025 exhibition at the Sean Kelly entitled Stony The Road.

After the conversation, attendees are welcome to join the artist and curator for a reception in the Lobby Gallery with books for sale. Tickets are $5 - $15 on a sliding scale basis and can be purchased here.

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 (2025-2026); and Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits at the Denver Art Museum (2024-2025). He has been the subject of several monographs, including Elegy (Aperture/VMFA, 2023), which chronicles Bey's history projects and landscape-based work. Bey is the recipient of numerous awards, including five honorary doctorates, and, in 2024, the artist was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Bey lives and works in Chicago and New York. He is currently a Critic at Yale University, where he received his Masters in Fine Arts, and is Professor Emeritus at Columbia College, Chicago.

Sophie Landres is a curator and art historian, specializing in intermedia, critical theory, and contemporary art. She is the Curator and Exhibitions Manager of The Dorsky Museum of Art in New Paltz, NY and serves as an Arts Commissioner and member of the Public Art Committee for the City of Kingston, NY. Sophie has organized exhibitions, performances, and discursive events in New York, NY, Marfa, TX, and Miami, FL and taught at Columbia University, Sotheby's Institute of Art, The New School, and New York University. Her writing has appeared in Art Basel Stories, Art Journal, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, and PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art among other publications. Sophie holds a PhD in Art History and Criticism from Stony Brook University, an MFA in Art Criticism and Writing from the School of Visual Arts, and a BA in Political Science from the University of Iowa. She is currently working on a series of essays about policing.

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