Jacob Lawrence

Jacob Armstead Lawrence (September 7, 1917 – June 9, 2000) was an American painter known for his portrayal of African-American historical subjects and contemporary life.

Lawrence referred to his style as "dynamic cubism," an art form popularized in Europe which drew great inspiration from West African and Meso-American art.

For his compositions, Lawrence found inspiration in everyday life in Harlem.

He brought the African-American experience to life using blacks and browns juxtaposed with vivid colors.

He also taught and spent 16 years as a professor at the University of Washington.

Lawrence is among the best known twentieth-century African-American painters, known for his modernist illustrations of everyday life as well as narratives of African-American history and historical figures.

At the age of 23 he gained national recognition with his 60-panel The Migration Series, which depicted the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North.

The series was purchased jointly by the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

Lawrence's works are in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Reynolda House Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Northwest Art.

Jacob Lawrence was born September 7, 1917, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where his parents had migrated from the rural south.

They divorced in 1924.

His mother put him and his two younger siblings into foster care in Philadelphia.

When he was 13, he and his siblings moved to New York City, where he reconnected with his mother in Harlem.

Lawrence was introduced to art shortly after that when their mother enrolled him in after-school classes at an arts and crafts settlement house in Harlem, called Utopia Children's Center, in an effort to keep him busy.

The young Lawrence often drew patterns with crayons.

In the beginning, he copied the patterns of his mother's carpets.

After dropping out of school at 16, Lawrence worked in a laundromat and a printing plant.

He continued with art, attending classes at the Harlem Art Workshop, taught by the noted African-American artist Charles Alston.

Alston urged him to attend the Harlem Community Art Center, led by the sculptor Augusta Savage.

Savage secured a scholarship to the American Artists School for Lawrence and a paid position with the Works Progress Administration, established during the Great Depression by the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Lawrence continued his studies as well, working with Alston and Henry Bannarn, another Harlem Renaissance artist, in the Alston-Bannarn workshop.

He also studied at Harlem Art Workshop in New York in 1937.

Harlem provided crucial training for the majority of Black artists in the United States.

Lawrence was one of the first artists trained in and by the African-American community in Harlem.

Throughout his lengthy artistic career, Lawrence concentrated on exploring the history and struggles of African Americans.

The "hard, bright, brittle" aspects of Harlem during the Great Depression inspired Lawrence as much as the colors, shapes, and patterns inside the homes of its residents.

"Even in my mother's home," Lawrence told historian Paul Karlstrom, "people of my mother's generation would decorate their homes in all sorts of color... so you'd think in terms of Matisse."

He used water-based media throughout his career.

Lawrence started to gain some notice for his dramatic and lively portrayals of both contemporary scenes of African-American urban life as well as historical events, all of which he depicted in crisp shapes, bright, clear colors, dynamic patterns, and through revealing posture and gestures.

At the very start of his career he developed the approach that made his reputation and remained his touchstone: creating series of paintings that told a story or, less often, depicted many aspects of a subject.

His first were biographical accounts of key figures of the African diaspora.

He was just 21 years old when his series of 41 paintings of the Haitian general Toussaint L’Ouverture, who led the revolution of the slaves that eventually gained independence, was shown in an exhibit of African-American artists at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

This was followed by a series of paintings of the lives of Harriet Tubman (1938–39) and Frederick Douglass (1939–40).

His teacher Charles Alston assesses Lawrence's work in an essay for an exhibition at the Harlem YMCA 1938:

"Having thus far miraculously escaped the imprint of academic ideas and current vogues in art,... he has followed a course of development dictated by his own inner motivations... Working in the very limited medium of flat tempera he achieved a richness and brilliance of color harmonies both remarkable and exciting... Lawrence symbolizes more than anyone I know, the vitality, the seriousness and promise of a new and socially conscious generation of Negro artists."

Lawrence completed the 60-panel set of narrative paintings entitled Migration of the Negro or And the Migrants Kept Coming, now called the Migration Series, in 1940–41.

The series portrayed the Great Migration, when hundreds of thousands of African Americans moved from the rural South to the urban North after World War I.

On July 24, 1941, Lawrence married the painter Gwendolyn Knight, also a student of Savage.

She helped prepare the gesso panels for his paintings and contributed to the captions for the paintings in his multi-painting works.

His 1947 painting The Builders hangs in the White House.