Untitled #5 (Tree Trunk, Picket Fence and House)

2017

Night Coming Tenderly, Black: Untitled #5 (Tree Trunk, Picket Fence and House), 2017. Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953). Gelatin silver print; image: 121.9 x 149.9 cm (48 x 59 in.); framed: 122.7 x 151.1 x 5.1 cm (48 5/16 x 59 1/2 x 2 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Dorothea Wright Hamilton Fund 2018.295 Bey describes this series as “a visual reimagining of the movement of fugitive slaves through the Cleveland and Hudson, Ohio, landscape as they approached Lake Erie and the final passage to freedom in Canada. . . . These photographs seek to approximate the spatial and sensory experience of those moving furtively through the darkness, and the landscapes they encountered.” This series was shot in Northeast Ohio at real sites used by the Underground Railroad and in landscapes typical of the region.