VMFA Curator Valerie Casel Oliver was in Chicago seeing friend and photographer Dawoud Bey when she had an idea.
It was 2017 and Bey was talking about a series of photographs he had made along the Underground Railroad.
Cassel Oliver had just moved to Richmond and visited the city’s historic slave trail. As Bey was talking about how the enslaved escaped from bondage, Cassel Oliver was thinking of the start of that journey.
"Being brought to the shores of this country," she remembers, "coming in through the James River, to this land and being walked into bondage."
So, she proposed an idea to her friend: come to Richmond and make another series of photographs.
"I knew in that instance what I did want to do was have him create a body of work for this institution that really spoke to the history of the city and of the state.”
The VMFA commissioned Bey to do the work in 2019. Now, almost five years later the idea has come to life.
Bey is well known for his portraiture work. But these images feature no human subjects. Instead, the audience can imagine themselves as the subjects. The landscapes are shot at eye level, peering through tree limbs or around the corners of buildings.
The large gelatin silver prints of the kudzu-covered trail along the James River have a dreamy quality. It’s like the landscapes exist outside the bounds of a specific time period.
"You could literally be transported into the moment of how someone walking this trail, setting foot on American soil for the first time, under the circumstances that they were brought what that experience may have looked like, may have felt like."
In addition to the photographs, the exhibit includes two film installations. including one produced with the help of Richmond locals entitled 350,000, the number of men, women and children sold into chattel slavery in the Virginia capital.
The soundtrack was created by a VCU dance and choreography professor.
"That evokes the movement of those 350,000 people into this landscape," Casel Oliver says. "With all of the anxiety, fear."
The exhibit pairs the new set of photos from Richmond with two other sets of Bey’s landscapes: the ones made along the Underground Railroad in Ohio that originally inspired Cassel Oliver and another series made of plantations in Louisiana.
Each of the series is housed in a separate room. The light shifts throughout, from early morning shadows along the river trail to bright noon daylight in the plantation images.
"They evoke labor, they evoke a kind of zenith of day. And as you enter the last series, which is called ‘Night Coming Tenderly Black’ it’s very very dark. Which is to evoke this notion of fugitivity and safety under the cover of night."
The exhibit ends with an invitation to viewers to share their own reflections, including an answer to the question: In what ways do you feel history is always present?
“In the land,” wrote one view. “What is left on top and what is buried underneath.”
The exhibit runs through the end of February. At the end of January, the museum is also hosting a two-day symposium.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
