The narrative of the current New Orleans Museum of Art exhibit “Dawoud Bey: Elegy” follows the movement of Africans into and out of American enslavement. In large-scale black-and-white landscape photos, Bey travels the Richmond, Virginia, Slave Trail, Louisiana plantations, and the final miles of the Underground Railroad in Ohio — a story that follows the enslaved peoples’ arrival into bondage, their forced agricultural labor, and then their perilous journey north to freedom.

Organized by Valerie Cassel Oliver, a curator at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the exhibit also features two video pieces, and the eerie audio soundtrack of one — a three-screen color survey of slave cabins at the Evergreen Plantation in Edgard — continuously echoes through the galleries. The video and some of

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