In the summer of 2006, one block away from its East Harbor campus, the Living Classrooms Foundation opened a new campus in Fells Point, the DouglassMyers Maritime Park and Museum, to celebrate the contributions of the African American community in the development of the city's maritime industry. The new facility is named for Frederick Douglass, who lived in Baltimore and worked in the city shipyards, and Isaac Myers, who led fourteen other free blacks in founding the Chesapeake Marine Railway and Drydock Company, the first African American-owned shipyard in the country.
At the Douglass-Myers Maritime Park, Living Classrooms focuses its public programming and employment training on at-risk youth. It includes an industrial warehouse, a working shipyard, a historic marine railway, hands-on exhibits, and sculpture honoring both Douglass and Myers. Marc Andre Robinson's sculpture honoring Douglass is a heroic-scale head cast in bronze and installed directly on the red brick entrance plaza, not far from the harbor. It is a very good likeness of Douglass, as good a likeness as James E. Lewis captured more than fifty years earlier in his statue of Douglass for Morgan State University (K8). But that is the only similarity in the two works .
Here, the sculptor focuses only on the physiognomy of Douglass' head and succeeds in revealing Douglass' intellect, his determination, and his humanity. Douglass' furrowed brow, his focused eyes, his set mouth, even the slightest tilt of his head, all contribute to a sense of the man he became. The suggestion that this head may have been dropped and broken into fragments, since sections of bronze are held in place by steel rods, clearly visible from the back, cannot diminish the power of his presence, surely an inspiring one to the youth of Baltimore who come here to learn.
Robinson received his BFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia in 1998 and his MFA from the Maryland Institute in 2002. A nearby text panel states that his choice of bronze as a material of great permanence was meant to reflect the indelible commitment of Living Classrooms to Baltimore youth.
Source: Kelly, Cindy, Outdoor Sculpture in Baltimore: A Historical Guide to Public Art in the Monumental City, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.