Jacob Lawrence

Jacob Lawrence was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1917, and died in his home in Seattle, Washington in 2000.  He moved to New York in 1931 when he began studying with the painter Charles Alson at the Works Progress Administration’s Harlem Art Workshop.  In 1936 he was awarded a scholarship to the American Artists’ School in New York City, and in 1938 he was hired by the WPA Federal Art Project.  During this period the artist began his best-known series, “Migration”, consisting of 60 panels and accompanying text which depicts the movements of African-Americans from the farms and rural communities of the South to the industrial cities of the North after World War I.  The “Migration” Series was exhibited at the Downtown Gallery, New York, and then was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.  He revisited the migration theme in a series of illustrations he did for a book of poetry by Langston Huges, One-way Ticket.  Lawrence, who had been described as a painter of the American scene, an American modernist, and a social realist, was given his first retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, in 1960, and his work has since been part of numerous exhibitions around the world.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.