Dawoud Bey at Art Gallery of Ontario

From acclaimed American artist Dawoud Bey comes a powerful installation of film and photographs that anchor the tenuous relationships between North American landscapes and Black diasporic experiences. On view from July 24, 2026 through Spring 2027, in the Frum Gallery at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), Dawoud Bey: Material Histories, Living Landscapes features a selection of works from the artist’s three landscape-based projects: In This Here Place (2019), Stony the Road (2023), and Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017) surrounding a film installation, anchored by a selection of African sculptures and ritual objects from the AGO’s collection.

For this presentation, as part of the 2026 Toronto Biennial of Art, Bey worked with Curator Allison Glenn to conceive of the installation as a site-specific work, reflecting on the core curatorial framework of ‘artists who use rupture as an ontological tool’ to shape the experience. At the AGO, visitors will experience Bey’s work as never seen before, with photographs hung close together in a sequence that evokes the spatial notion of constraint within the landscapes depicted in Bey’s photographs that were inhabited by the unseen Black bodies that are the subjects of his work and who inhabited these spaces. Presented in this way, the landscapes become abstractions, or echoes, of the chaos of this historical time.

Stony the Road reimagines the journey made by 350,000 enslaved Africans along the Richmond Slave Trail between 1830 and 1860, marking the first encounter of enslaved Africans with America. In This Here Place focuses on plantations in Louisiana, a continuation of Bey’s examination of African American history and his efforts to make the Black past resonate in the contemporary moment. And, finally, Night Coming Tenderly, Black, a series of black-and-white photographs that reimagine sites along the last stages of the Underground Railroad. At the entrance to the exhibition, a large-scale, vinyl-printed reproduction of Untitled #25 (Lake Erie and the Sky) (2017) from the Night Coming Tenderly, Black series anchors this work, and the viewer, in Ontario and the Great Lakes region; a location often envisioned as emancipatory for those seeking liberation from enslavement.

Four sculptures and ritual objects from the Frum Collection are included in this presentation, visually and historically developing a call and response between West African histories in the United States and Canada and those held in Nigeria, Ghana, and the Kongo, between the arrival and the departure, and the historical rupture manifest by the Middle Passage. These four works continue the narrative which Bey charts with his monumental photographic works, visually representing the enduring dialogues between North America and Africa.

Dawoud Bey: Material Histories, Living Landscapes provides a space for contemplating the enduring legacies of history in the contemporary moment. Presented at the AGO, in partnership with the Toronto Biennial of Art 2026, this exhibition is curated by Allison Glenn, Curator of the 2026 Toronto Biennial of Art, and will be on view through Spring 2027.