The Brooklyn Rail

In Stony the Road, American artist Dawoud Bey (b. 1953 in Queens, New York) places himself in a Richmond, Virginia corridor steeped in historical trauma. Touring the city with a desire to understand its colonial, constitutional past, the artist visited the Slave Trail, of which only three miles remains, in an effort to understand the region’s history and empathize with enslaved people who had no choice but to walk the narrow promenade. The photographer has long participated in history-based projects, and it was for this reason that curator Valerie Cassel Oliver recommended Virginia, believing it would complement the artist’s past endeavors: street portraits in Harlem, photographs narrating an imaginary escape from the Underground Railroad, and now, a march along what remains of the Slave Trail. The exhibition presents a black-and-white photographic series “Stony the Road” (2023), and corresponding film 350,000 (2023), which capture the weight of Richmond’s history within the confines of a constrained space.

The artist admits that the Slave Trail’s limited physical dimensions presented certain challenges. Exploring the architecture, contemplating how best to transform a three-mile-by-five-foot space into a cohesive body of work, Bey visited the path on multiple occasions, extracting meaning from the surrounding nature and studying the traces of the 350,000 enslaved Africans who were forced to exist in the space. The series reframes the Slave Trail into a layered photographic canvas, transforming its horrific past into a series of beautiful objects. Bey looked out at the nearby James River, the lush greenery and towering trees, and the dirt underfoot, toeing the line between past and present, camera in hand, as he experimented with the trail’s geometry.

The artist’s thirteen photographs engulf the viewers, placing them in the same physical position as the captives. Untitled (Tangled Branches) (2023) places the viewer directly beside the path, behind silhouettes of dark branches, as if in hiding, immersed in the contrast of light and shadow, adjacent to the corridor but not quite on it, the woods beckoning with the promise of escape. The photograph invites us to step off-trail—to move aside, to hide, to wait. Untitled (Curve in the Trail) (2023), meanwhile, shows the trail veering to the right, shrouded in shrubbery on either side, a vast unknown up ahead. Here, the viewers contemplate the perils that lie before them; studying the photograph of black-and-white bushes amid shades of gray, the invisible subjects of this still image endure immense dread. The work highlights the materiality of the trail, allowing it to function in an almost seductive manner, all while drawing the audience into the narrative. Untitled (James River) (2023) uses form and composition to showcase the reflective James River, the water symbolizing the means by which the enslaved arrived in the United States. The work is a fleeting sidelong glance at the water: a symbol of the disorientation of those forced into bondage. Throughout the series, Bey draws a parallel between the series and the experience of being shackled en route to the United States, of moving through an unfamiliar place in terror without any grasp of where or what it is. His photographs aim to make this disorientation tangible, to make visible the unease of history.

These works complement Bey’s film 350,000, an exercise in sonic layering. Named for the masses forced to walk the Slave Trail, the ten-minute video includes the imagined sound of 350,000 pairs of feet, men and women, children and adults—everyone. Collaborating with choreographer and Virginia Commonwealth University Professor E. Gaynell Sherrod, cinematographer Bron Moyi, and sound designer Paul Bruski, Bey crafted a multisensory experience: footage from the trail, from the perspective of those in captivity, natural beauty made ominous in black-and-white, paired with a foundational sound alongside ambient noise, spatially and emotionally conveying the clank of frigid chains, the footsteps of the enslaved, and the rhythmic breath of the bodies marching forward. Repeated overdubbing offers a firsthand understanding of the Slave Trail’s history, culminating in auditory cacophony that transcends visual representation.

Bey’s overarching project places itself in a larger conversation about Black expressive culture. The artist intentionally references works like Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s book Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (2019), which covers different facets of African American history. Yet he embeds his own “Stony the Road” project within the broader narrative of Black history, creating an open dialogue about the Black experience and crafting a continuum of expression and resistance, captured within an isolated play of space and time.