Summer Series: Cathy Opie and Dawoud Bey

Jul 24, 2025 12:30PM-1:30PM

Schermer Meeting Hall

Cathy Opie: (b. 1961, Sandusky, OH; lives in Los Angeles) is known for her powerfully dynamic photography that examines the ideals and norms surrounding the culturally constructed American dream and American identity. She first gained recognition in the 1990s for her series of studio portraits, photographing gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals drawn from her circle of friends and artists. Opie has traveled extensively across the country exploring the diversity of America’s communities and landscapes, documenting quintessential American subjects—high school football players and the 2008 presidential inauguration—while also continuing to display America’s subcultures through formal portraits. Using dramatic staging, Opie presents queer and trans bodies in intimate photographs that evoke traditional Renaissance portraiture—images of power and respect. In her portraits and landscapes, Opie establishes a level of ambiguity of both identity and place by exaggerating masculine or feminine characteristics, or by exaggerating distance, cropping, or blurring her landscapes.

Dawoud Bey: Groundbreaking American artist and MacArthur Fellow Dawoud Bey examines the Black past and present. His photographs and film installations engage the oft disappeared histories of the Black presence in America. Bey began his career as a photographer in 1975 with a series of photographs, “Harlem, U.S.A,,” that were exhibited to critical acclaim in his first one-person exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. His work has since been the subject of numerous major museum and gallery exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe, with works held in numerous public collections.

Panel

Catherine Opie

Summer Series Speaker

Catherine Opie (b. 1961) is one of the most important photographers of her generation. Her subjects have included early seminal portraits of the LGBTQ+ community, the architecture of Los Angeles’ freeway system, mansions in Beverly Hills, Midwestern icehouses, high school football players, California surfers, and abstract landscapes of National Parks, among others. She was a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow recipient and the Robert Mapplethorpe Resident in Photography at the American Academy in Rome for 2021. She has exhibited at international venues such as Guggenheim Museum in New York, The Photographer’s Gallery in London, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark. Opie was a professor of photography at UCLA for 25 years. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Learn More

Dawoud Bey

Summer Series Speaker

Groundbreaking American artist and MacArthur Fellow Dawoud Bey examines the Black past and present. His photographs and film installations engage the oft disappeared histories of the Black presence in America. Bey began his career as a photographer in 1975 with a series of photographs, “Harlem, U.S.A,,” that were exhibited to critical acclaim in his first one-person exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. His work has since been the subject of numerous major museum and gallery exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe, with works held in numerous public collections. Recent solo museum exhibitions include Elegy (2023-2024), an exhibition of the artist’s history-based photographs and film works at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts which travels to the New Orleans Museum of Art later this year; and Dawoud Bey: An American Project (2020-2022), which was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and traveled to the High Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. His work was also recently the subject of the two-person exhibition Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue organized by the Grand Rapids Museum of Art that traveled to the Seattle Art Museum, Tampa Museum of Art, and The Getty Center. Opening in November 2024 at the Denver Art Museum, Dawoud Bey will present the solo exhibition, Street Portraits, the first standalone museum show to explore the iconic series. Bey’s work has been the subject of several monographs, including Elegy (Aperture/VMFA, 2023), a major publication documenting his landscape retrospective at VMFA, a forty-year retrospective monograph Seeing Deeply (University of Texas Press, 2017), and the recent Street Portraits (MACK Books, 2021). His critical writings on contemporary art and photography have appeared in a range of publications, including recent monograph essays on artists Jordan Casteel and Deborah Roberts. In addition to his MacArthur Fellowship, Bey is a recipient of many awards and distinctions, including recognition by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2024), the College Art Association (2023), the ICP Infinity Award (2019), a Lifetime Achievement Award from Howard University (2017), the United States Artists Fellowship (2015), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2002), and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1991), among many other honors. He has been the recipient of four honorary doctorate degrees. Bey lives and works in Chicago and New York. He is a Critic and alumnus at Yale University and is Professor Emeritus at Columbia College, Chicago. He is represented by Sean Kelly Gallery, NY and LA, Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago, and Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco. He currently resides in Chicago.

Learn More