Celebrated portrait photographer Dawoud Bey coming to Tacoma

Dawoud Bey, an internationally recognized artist and photographer, has been invited as a visiting artist to create portraits that represent the Tacoma community. Bey’s large-scale, natural portraits will pair different people in local settings to capture the character of the community.

“[Early in my career], I began to realize I was always drawn back to photographs of people,” Bey told Chicago Magazine last year. “I wanted to make photographs that resonated in the same way, but using subjects I cared about.”

As part of the Washington State Art in Public Places Program, Bey will create 10 to 12 portraits of Tacoma people that will be permanently exhibited at UW Tacoma in the Snoqualmie Building.

Bey is a professor of art and was named Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago, where he has taught since 1998. Bey studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York and holds an MFA in photography from Yale University. His work has been the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Walker Art Center (1995) and a four-year traveling exhibition, called Class Pictures, mounted by Aperture and first shown in 2007 at the Addison Gallery of American Art.

This project will produce an important and lasting legacy for our region, celebrating Tacoma as a place that includes the new and the old, industrial and natural, and every race, ethnicity and religion as well as a wide range of professions, vocations and types of service to the community.

Anyone interested in being considered for participation in this project can attend a reception for the artist on Saturday, March 23, at 6 p.m. in the Snoqualmie Building on the UW Tacoma campus. The artist will choose his subjects from those in attendance.