Untitled #25 (Lake Erie and Sky)

Narrator: Bey made these photographs in response to a commission for the 2018 Front Triennial, in Cleveland. As he researched the history of northeast Ohio, he discovered that it had played an important role in the Underground Railroad. He began thinking about ways to portray this history and depict the sites that had protected those fleeing slavery. 

Dawoud Bey: Of necessity, those locations, most of them were never known. They couldn’t be. They weren’t supposed to be. So there is that layer of invisibility built into the history. And so what I did was through research finding a few sites that are in fact known to be related to the Underground Railroad and then began to look at the landscape around those sites imagining a fugitive African American moving through that landscape, what that landscape might have looked like and felt like. 

They’re all about the imagination. Looking closely at a piece of the land and noticing all of these thorns that certainly make the landscape so much more threatening if one had to move through it. So when I thought about it through that particular narrative, the landscape became for me a very transformed space. And that’s the space and place that I want the viewer to think about when they look at that work. I want them to completely forget about the present. This work is not about the present, which is why those photographs are all so large. I wanted to create a physical space for the viewer to enter into that, allow them just to be in that landscape.