Night Coming Tenderly, Black: Untitled #9
- Artist: Dawoud Bey
- Date: 2017, printed 2020
- Medium: Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper, mounted on aluminium
- Dimensions: image: 1118 × 1388 mm
- Museum: Tate Modern
- Collection record: Tate Modern website
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About this artwork
This is the "Night Coming Tenderly, Black: Untitled #9" by Dawoud Bey. It was made in 2017, printed in 2020 as a gelatin silver print on paper, mounted on aluminium. The image shows a dark rural Ohio landscape—thickets, fields, and the shoreline of Lake Erie—captured at night. The absence of people invites you to imagine the silent, precarious journey of enslaved people on the Underground Railroad. The glossy surface reflects your own face, blurring the boundary between viewer and history. Bey cites Roy DeCarava’s mastery of black tones and Langston Hughes’s poem “Night coming tenderly/Black like me” as inspirations. This work is on long‑term loan from the Tate Americas Foundation and sits in the Poetics of Blackness room at Tate Modern.
See it in person
Night Coming Tenderly, Black: Untitled #9 is in the collection of Tate Modern on Bankside, London — free to enter. Point your phone at any artwork there and audioguide.london plays a free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
