14 / AMAM.OBERLIN.EDU ON VIEW / NORTHWEST AMBULATORY / AUG 29–JAN 21 PICTURING THE INTANGIBLE Oberlin Looks at Dawoud Bey’s Night Coming Tenderly, Black A large, greyscale photograph by Dawoud Bey captures an opening in the woods—a glimpse of Lake Erie. Details in the photograph come into focus only with prolonged looking, as if adjusting one’s eyes to the darkness of night. In his series Night Coming Tenderly, Black fromwhich the photograph comes, Bey said, “I didn’t just want to document what remained of that history, but I wanted to find a way through the imagination to make it resonate through the photograph.” In light of Bey’s aim to use imagination to transcend the documentary role of photography, in this small, experimental installation, the curators dispense with art-historical interpretation to allow visitors to see this photograph through the reflections and alternative connections offered by community members with a personal connection to the work’s subject. They include Langston Hughes’s poem fromwhich the work takes its title, a 19th-century testimonial by a self-emancipatedman, the story of a traveler on the Underground Railroad told by his great-great-great-granddaughter, and the voices of the Oberlin Gospel Choir. These voices offer an experience of the work that is more multisensory, deeply personal, and ultimately more historical, than any art historical analysis. Organized by SamAdams, Ellen Johnson ’33 Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, and Hannah Wirta Kinney, Curator of Academic Programs. Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953), Night Coming Tenderly, Black: Untitled #24 (At Lake Erie), 2017. Gelatin silver print. MuseumFriends Fund, 2019.17.
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