MoMA | Tag: One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North

Posts tagged ‘One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North’

June 18, 2015 | Collection & Exhibitions, Learning and Engagement

Moving Through the Migration Series: An Interview with Kerry Downey and Shellyne Rodriguez

Posted by Calder Zwicky, Assistant Director, Teen and Community Partnerships

Participants from Elders Share the Arts (ESTA) viewing the exhibition One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North

How does artwork created within a specific cultural and political context connect with viewers across multiple generations and disparate locations? How can an institution remain relevant to contemporary audiences while maintaining a commitment to preserving and championing artwork from past generations? Shellyne Rodriguez and Kerry Downey are two longtime teaching artists working with MoMA’s Community and Access Programs who, in addition to their work across a wide range of educational groups, both run the majority of the Museum’s Community Partnerships

Migration Rhapsody: An Aleatoric Exploration of the Journey North

Posted by Jodi Roberts, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture

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.

A Homecoming for Romare Bearden’s The Visitation

Posted by Judy Hecker, Assistant Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints

Romare Bearden (American, 1911−1988). The Visitation. 1941. Gouache, ink, and pencil on brown paper, 30 1/2 x 46 1/2″ (77.5 x 118.1 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (by exchange). Acquired with the cooperation of the Estate of Nanette Bearden and the Romare Bearden Foundation whose mission is to preserve the legacy of the artist. © Romare Bearden Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Before Romare Bearden turned to the medium of collage in 1964—the multilayered compositions, for which he is best known—he was steeped in the language of drawing and painting. The Visitation (1941) (now on view in the exhibition One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North) exemplifies a critical early moment in the development of an artist who would become a leading voice in the cultural life of Harlem and in the history of American art. Recently acquired by MoMA, The Visitation returns to the Museum’s galleries for the first time since the 1971 retrospective Romare Bearden: The Prevalence of Ritual.