Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series

Thursday, February 25, 2010
12:30 PM

In 1941, at barely twenty-three years of age, the artist Jacob Lawrence completed The Migration of the Negro (later called The Migration Series), an epic grouping of sixty small, portable narrative panels intended to chronicle the mass movement of African Americans during the first decades of the twentieth century from the rural South to industrialized cities in the North and Midwest in search of a better life. This talk explores Lawrence’s influential series within the context of its inception, production, early exhibition, and reception.

Larissa Bailiff (PhD candidate, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University), has taught undergraduate and graduate art history courses at Pratt and FIT. A former Associate Educator at MoMA, she currently lectures and teaches courses at the Museum.