Art

Dream Land

Cincinnati Museum Center  |  Holiday Junction  |  2018

Dream Land installed at Holiday Junction: two suspended discs carrying Art Deco skylines of Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky, joined by the Roebling bridge, floating above the model train landscape
Dream Land at Holiday Junction, Cincinnati Museum Center, 2018.

Dream Land lives in Union Terminal, where refugees from the war in Europe, so many of them Jewish, stepped off trains into a city they would learn to call home, in a country that advertises a dream. Many of their descendants are still here. Some of them Leo knows by name.

The title also holds a quieter grief. The opioid epidemic was moving through this same river valley as the piece was built, and the name makes room for the lost and for the families who grieve them.

And it is a piece about looking up. Cincinnati is an architectural dream landscape; Dream Land is rendered in Art Deco because the building it lives in, and the region it renders, taught it how to look. Smithsonian Magazine noticed, citing the “stylized replicas of the Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky skylines designed in Art Deco” in its national roundup of holiday displays that December. The work earned an Addy Award in 2018.

The skyline discs suspended mid-install, the Roebling bridge spanning between them, the exhibit hall still under construction below
The skylines hang. The Roebling bridge spans the discs; the hall is still a construction site below.
The layered silhouette skyline mid-assembly in the studio
Assembly: the layered silhouettes taking shape.
Detail of the Music Hall silhouette, its rose window rendered in rust tones
Music Hall, rose window. Detail.
Leo D’Cruz in hard hat and safety vest inside the Union Terminal restoration site
On site. The museum was itself one of Cincinnati’s largest public–private civic restorations.
The Art Deco facade of Union Terminal, cascading fountains in the foreground
The reference: Union Terminal.