Jacob Lawrence. The migrants arrived in great numbers. 1940-41. Casein tempera on hardboard, 12 x 18" (30.5 x 45.7 cm). Gift of Mrs. David M. Levy

“I do not look upon the story of the Blacks in America as a separate experience to the American culture but as a part of the American heritage and experience as a whole.”

Jacob Lawrence

“I do not look upon the story of the Blacks in America as a separate experience to the American culture but as a part of the American heritage and experience as a whole,” the artist Jacob Lawrence said in 1943.1 Though he came of age before the Civil Rights Movement brought African Americans the rights they had long been denied, Lawrence forged a prominent career as an artist, chronicling the story of Black life in America through his paintings.

Born in New Jersey and raised from the age of 13 in Harlem, this Northeast native had southern roots. He was the child of migrants who moved, together with millions of other African Americans, from the rural South to urban, industrialized Midwestern and Northeastern cities during the mass relocation known as the Great Migration (1915–1950s). Lawrence maintained that he was “a child of the Great Migration,” which shaped the course of his own and his fellow African Americans’ lives.2

If the Great Migration provided him with geographical advantages, it was Harlem, then in the midst of the cultural and intellectual outpouring known as the Harlem Renaissance (1920s–1930s), that inspired him to make art. As he once described his beloved neighborhood: “All these people on the street, various colors, so much pattern, so much movement, so much color, so much vitality, so much energy.”3 The textures of Harlem, and the narrative dynamism of the songs, Bible stories, sermons, and tales of his neighbors’ journeys north that he witnessed in church, shaped Lawrence’s approach to art making. He realized that through painting he, too, could give voice to the experiences of his people.

In the early 1930s, he enrolled in his first art classes. By the time he was 23, he had completed five narrative series on major people and events in Black history, including Toussaint L’Ouverture, the leader of the Haitian Revolution, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman, the former slave and abolitionist who smuggled others to freedom on the Underground Railroad. He used descriptive titles, vibrant patterns and blocks of color, and simplified, angular figures and forms to distill epic narratives into powerfully direct images. This style, applied to topics ranging from neighborhood life to the experiences of Black industrial laborers to the Civil Rights Movement, characterized his work throughout his career.

Between 1940 and 1941, while World War II raged and Harlem continued absorbing newly arriving Black southerners, Lawrence was busy studying, listening, and painting a narrative series about the Great Migration. Before putting brush to panel, he spent months at the library, researching this mass relocation. He also listened to his parents, family, and neighbors tell the tales of their own northward journeys. And he wrote, completing the text for the short narratives that would serve as both titles and captions for the 60 individual paintings that together comprise his celebrated Migration Series.

“I worked very fast,” Lawrence explained. “From the concept and the drawings to the completion of the works… that may have taken six to eight months.”4 His materials—quick-drying tempera paint and hardboard panels—were inexpensive and suited to his working method. Spreading out all of the panels simultaneously, he sketched images and scenes with a pencil. He then filled in his sketches with a limited range of colors, working with only one color at a time and applying it across all 60 panels. In his words: “I had a very simple palette. I went through all the panels painting yellows, greens, blues, so they’re all the same. I didn’t mix color. I left it pure, as it was, ’cause I wanted the series to be a unit. I consider it one work, not 60 works.”5

Lawrence focused on the people at the heart of the Great Migration, breaking apart this mass relocation of millions into intimate vignettes, often centered upon human figures. Each one is spare, in keeping with the artist’s belief that a lot of information could be conveyed through limited visual means. In the panel titled In the North the Negro had better educational facilities, three young girls stand side-by-side facing a chalkboard, their right arms outstretched as they practice writing numbers. The scene is composed of geometric shapes, with rectangles forming the gray chalkboard and the brown walls of the classroom, triangles forming the girls’ braids, and a combination of these shapes forming their pastel-colored dresses. Like the girls, Lawrence benefitted from the better education made possible by his elders’ migration north. In turn, he educated others—Black and white—when he embarked on the making of the Migration Series as both an artist and a teacher.

In 1941, with segregation in full force, he broke a racial barrier by becoming the first African American artist whose work was acquired by The Museum of Modern Art. Through his vivid, accessible visual storytelling, Lawrence presented the richness and complexities of African American history and culture both to his own community and to the larger world.

Karen Kedmey, independent scholar, 2021

  1. MoMA artist’s questionnaire, 1943.

  2. Jacob Lawrence, quoted in Phillips Collection “Over the Line” microsite, http://www.phillipscollection.org/sites/default/files/interactive/jacob-lawrence-over-the-line/

  3. ibid.

  4. Jacob Lawrence, quoted in MoMA Audio+ Guide, https://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/audios/371/5372

  5. ibid.

Wikipedia entry
Introduction
Jacob Armstead Lawrence (September 7, 1917 – June 9, 2000) was an American painter known for his portrayal of African-American historical subjects and contemporary life. Lawrence referred to his style as "dynamic cubism", although by his own account the primary influence was not so much French art as the shapes and colors of Harlem. He brought the African-American experience to life using blacks and browns juxtaposed with vivid colors. He also taught and spent 16 years as a professor at the University of Washington. Lawrence is among the best known twentieth-century African-American painters, known for his modernist illustrations of everyday life as well as narratives of African-American history and historical figures. At the age of 23 he gained national recognition with his 60-panel The Migration Series, which depicted the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North. The series was purchased jointly by the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Lawrence's works are in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, Reynolda House Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Northwest Art. His 1947 painting The Builders hangs in the White House.
Wikidata
Q355566
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Getty record
Introduction
Jacob Lawrence was the first African-American painter whose work was displayed in the collection of MOMA in New York. His bright, colorful, genre painters became associated with the Harlem Renaissance of the 1930s and 1940s. Lawrence got his start as an artist by taking classes at the Utopia Neighborhood House, 135th Street Library, and the Harlem Workshop in New York City. He was then supported by the Federal Arts Project through the WPA during the Depression. Outside of his career as an artist, Lawrence taught classes at the Art Students League, Bradeis University, Black Mountain College, the Skohegan School, and the University of California. He also served as a professor and coordinator at the Pratt Institute in New York city.
Nationalities
American, African American
Gender
Male
Roles
Artist, Painter
Names
Jacob Lawrence, Jacob Armstead Lawrence, Jacob A. Lawrence
Ulan
500027690
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Information from Getty’s Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License

Works

40 works online

Exhibitions

View all 22 exhibitions

Audio

Publications

  • MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art Introduction by Glenn D. Lowry, 2019 Flexibound, 408 pages
  • MoMA Now: Highlights from The Museum of Modern Art—Ninetieth Anniversary Edition Introduction by Glenn D. Lowry, 2019 Hardcover, 424 pages
  • Among Others: Blackness at MoMA Charlotte Barat and Darby English, 2019 Hardcover, 488 pages
  • Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series By Leah Dickerman and Elsa Smithgall, 2015 Exhibition catalogue, Hardcover, 192 pages
  • Jake Makes a World: Jacob Lawrence, A Young Artist in Harlem By Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts. Illustrated by Christopher Myers, 2015 Hardcover, 32 pages
  • The Great Migration: An American Story Jacob Lawrence, 1993 Paperback, 48 pages
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