Jacob Lawrence became a national sensation in 1941 with the premiere of a 60 panel series of paintings titled Migration of the Negro (now the Migration Series) which chronicled the Great Migration of Blacks from the South to the North after World War I. Lawrence’s subsequent paintings and prints, often done in series, dealt with the ongoing experiences of Black Americans, as well as historical figures such as Toussaint L’Ouverture, Harriett Tubman, John Brown, and Frederick Douglass. His style is characterized by the use of bold, vibrant color and flattened, stylized figures and space.
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Celebrated during his lifetime, Lawrence was a groundbreaking Black artist. He was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey and lived with his parents until their split in 1924. Lawrence and his siblings were placed in foster care by his mother while she moved to New York to look for work. The children joined their mother in Harlem six years later, and Lawrence was briefly enrolled at the Utopia Children’s Center but dropped out of school at sixteen. He continued studying art at the Harlem Art Workshop with Charles Alston, a leading artist in the Harlem Renaissance movement. Lawrence attended the American Artists School from 1937-1939 on a scholarship and, after graduation, received funding from the Works Progress Administration (WPA), support that resulted in the 1941 Migration Series. Drafted into the Coast Guard at the start of WWII, he served as an artist on a troopship where he documented the experiences of U.S. personnel. After the war he continued to paint and taught for a summer at Black Mountain College in North Carolina at the invitation of Josef Albers. He was also an instructor in New York City at the Pratt Institute, the New School for Social Research, and the Art Students League.
After living and working in New York for many years, Lawrence accepted a position at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he taught until his retirement in 1986. Today, his paintings and prints are held in major collections around the U.S., including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago