SPACES Gallery
Cleveland, OH
January 2019

"Crossing The Water" is composed as the second in a series of gestures invoking the memory of an enslaved child, Lee Howard Dobbins acknowledging him as more than a forgotten symbol of local opposition to the institution of slavery. In 1853, this child, accompanied by his adopted mother and siblings fled Kentucky, crossed the Ohio River, and traveled north intent on reaching Lake Erie, and Canada. However, the boy was too sick to continue the journey, and it was necessary to leave him in the care of a family in Oberlin, Ohio with the intention of rejoining his people in Canada upon recovery. Lee Howard Dobbins died among strangers at four years of age in Oberlin two weeks later, and is interred there. He experienced his first moments as a free person upon touching ground on the Ohio side of the river, however, this child never saw Lake Erie, or reached soil beyond the grasp of bounty hunters.

Requiem is a meditation upon a liminal moment of transition between the trauma experienced in his brief life, and a space beyond boundaries: an imagined place in which he might have been free.

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