Jacob Lawrence

Jacob Lawrence came to Harlem, a vibrant African American neighborhood in New York City, in 1930 at the age of thirteen. Lawrence’s mother, originally from Virginia, and his father, from South Carolina, were part of the Great Migration of African Americans who left their isolated communities in the South to resettle in industrialized, highly populated urban areas in the American North. Harlem quickly became home to myriad cultural forms and practices that contributed to the creation of a self-conscious African American identity and fostered the flowering of cultural expression known as the Harlem Renaissance, which began in the 1920s.

Soon after arriving in Harlem, Lawrence’s mother enrolled him in an afterschool arts and crafts workshop at Utopia Children’s House set up by Professor James Wells of Washington, D.C.’s Howard University. There the young artist was encouraged to experiment with manipulating patterns, textures, and colors. Lawrence continued his artistic education in the Harlem Art Workshop and later rented a space in artist Charles Alston’s Studio 306, a gathering place for artists and writers. Lawrence was educated by the various workshops and bodegas of Depression-era Harlem, which provided the necessary foundation for those who lived in the community to train in the visual arts as a crucial means of racial uplift.

Lawrence began creating images of Harlem in 1935. They featured his immediate personal surroundings and experiences and offered sardonic portraits of city life, calling attention to racial tensions and urban issues such as poverty and crime. This early work was recognized in 1938 with a solo exhibition at the 135th street YMCA, thus affirming Lawrence’s art and vision in the very place where he lived and drew inspiration. Moved by his studies of modern art at museums and galleries downtown and by his research uptown at the Schaumburg Library, Lawrence decided to paint the lives of iconic figures in African American history, a subject largely invisible to mainstream America. He produced several series of 30 to 40 panels in his own flattened and distilled modernist style that memorialized individuals such as Toussaint L’Ouverture, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman. By 1940, Lawrence received a fellowship to illustrate “the great Negro migration during the World War.” Lawrence culled his own family’s experiences, oral histories from the community, and author Carter G. Woodson’s recently published histories to create a collective biography that became The Migration of the Negro, which traced the mass movement of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North between World War I and World War II.

Following the completion of that series in 1941, Lawrence was invited to join New York’s Downtown Gallery, making him the first artist of African descent to be represented by a major commercial gallery. Downtown Gallery provided Lawrence with the opportunity to engage with and exhibit alongside other contemporary modernist painters, including Stuart Davis, John Marin, and Charles Sheeler. Lawrence held a number of important teaching positions throughout his career and continued to produce paintings, drawings, and illustrations of the African American experience in the United States and Africa until his death in 2000, output which solidified his position as one of the most prominent American artists of the twentieth century.