review - dawoud bey: elegy @ NOMA

Details of the works Tree and Cabin (left) and Conjoined Trees and Field (right) by Dawoud Bey, 2019

​Dawoud Bey: Elegy @ NOMA
Review by Jamie Chiarello

​An elegy is a poem of serious reflection, often a lament for those past. The exhibition currently on show at the NOMA by Dawoud Bey carries this title and I couldn't think of one more fitting.

The moment we step through the massive doors we are transported somewhere dark and slightly disorienting. We are surrounded by the sounds of muffled murmurs, twigs breaking and wind whistling. In every which direction there are pathways and tangles of tree branches. It feels like simultaneously one is being beckoned to run anywhere and nowhere. These are the banks of the James river in present day Richmond Virginia, the same banks slaves saw after being kidnapped and brought to an unknown land.

Bey does an excellent (and difficult) job of simultaneously sharing with us the actual sights and sounds slaves experienced while also conveying the impossibility of entirely revealing all literal aspects of history. He pivots from the literal and pushes us into experience and contemplation. A massive screen rolls footage that in any other context might seem mundane or commonplace. Perhaps that is what is so unsettling.

We want to believe that the horrors of history, like slavery, are experiences that are not common place. Moving through the exhibit it is impossible to shake the eeriness of this possibility. Over and over I felt confronted by these sights, imagining someone hundreds of years ago taken to a new land, searching and searching for a sign of the familiar. We are asked to reconcile the irreconcilable. The beauty of the landscape and the brutal humanity it held.

When you reach the benches facing the video installation I ask that you sit down and give yourself to the moment for 15 minutes. As a skeptic of contemporary art, I have lingered at countless video installations that made and left no impression on me. I won't describe what is there for your own experience, but I felt my breath slow, my soul ache. I felt a deep connection to my own humanity and a tremendous longing for things ungraspable.

Scattered through out the show are quotes by various writers and Bey as well. One by Toni Morrison echos a perfect sentiment of the show: "Here, in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in the grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it."

I cannot encourage you strongly enough to go and experience this powerful show while it is at the NOMA. The curation is gorgeous, as though only what was essential was included. When handling a subject this heavy, and work as intense as Bey's, an intention to create an air of reverence is necessary -  that is exactly what can be experienced here. 

Dawoud Bey: Elegy runs at NOMA through January 4th, 2026. Click here for more information.