Betty Selvage and Faith Speights
Dawoud Bey, American, born 1953
2014
Carbon pigment print on 308 gsm Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Paper
Edition of twenty numbered copies, plus five artist proofs
Image: 16 1/4 × 25 5/16 in. (41.2 × 64.3 cm)
Sheet: 20 × 30 in. (50.8 × 76.2 cm)
Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth: Purchased through the Evelyn A. and William B. Jaffe 2015 Fund, the Virginia and Preston T. Kelsey 1958 Fund, and the Elizabeth and David C. Lowenstein '67 Fund
© Dawoud Bey
2025.24.1.1
Portfolio / Series Title
Birmingham: Four Girls, Two Boys
Geography
Place Made: United States, North America
Period
21st century
Object Name
Photograph
Research Area
Photograph
American History
Not on view
Label
This set of portraits is meant to evoke one of the children whose life was taken in the 1963 Ku Klux Klan bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. There are two portraits in each diptych of different people that together commemorate a murdered child. One person is the age the dead girl should have been in 2014 (when the photo was taken); the other person is the age of the girl when she was killed in the service of White supremacy. Produced fifty years after their deaths, these photographs commemorate one of the four girls: Addie Mae Collins (age fourteen), Carol Denise McNair (age eleven), Carole Rosamond Robertson (age fourteen), and Cynthia Dionne Wesley (age fourteen), who were murdered during the act of terrorism itself.
From the 2026 exhibition Inhabiting Historical Time: Slavery and Its Afterlives, curated by Amelia Kahl (Barbara C. & Harvey P. Hood 1918 Senior Curator of Academic Programming) and Alisa Swindell (Associate Curator of Photography)
Exhibition History
Inhabiting Historical Time: Slavery and Its Afterlives, Jaffe and Hall Galleries, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, December 20, 2025 - July 11, 2026.
Provenance
Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago, Illinois, September, 2014; sold to present collection, 2025.
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