The full lineup of Migration Rhapsody: An Aleatoric Exploration of the Journey North through Music, Poetry, and Personal Narrative, The Museum of Modern Art, April 23, 2015. Photo: Julieta Cervantes
Music plays a big role in The Museum of Modern Art’s current exhibition One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North. Songs by a diverse range of musicians—Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington, Josh White and Paul Robeson, Louis Armstrong and William Grant Still, to name a few—fill the exhibition galleries. These artists, like the painter Jacob Lawrence himself, were keenly aware of the impact that the Great Migration, the multi-decade mass movement of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North, had on modern American culture.
