White befriended the internationally renowned painter Jacob Lawrence in the early 1940s, after Lawrence had completed his celebrated Migration Series. Both artists were previously included in Edith Halpert’s exhibition American Negro Art: 19th and 20th Centuries at Downtown Gallery, a groundbreaking group show that presented 41 African American artists. White took numerous formal portraits of his contemporaries while living in New York, creating visual records of his interactions and dialogues with other seminal figures in 20th-century art.