Jacob Lawrence

Jacob Armstead Lawrence (September 7, 1917 – June 9, 2000) was an American painter who focused on African-American history and everyday life. He called his approach "dynamic cubism," a style that came from Europe but was heavily influenced by West African and Meso-American art. Lawrence drew inspiration from the daily scenes of Harlem, using blacks and browns alongside bright colors to depict the African-American experience. He also taught for 16 years as a professor at the University of Washington.

Lawrence was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to parents who had moved from the rural South. After their divorce in 1924, his mother placed him and his two siblings in foster care in Philadelphia. At 13, Lawrence moved to New York City and reunited with his mother in Harlem. She enrolled him in after-school art classes at the Utopia Children's Center, where he began drawing patterns, often copying those from his mother's carpets. He left school at 16, working in a laundromat and a printing plant while continuing his art studies at the Harlem Art Workshop under Charles Alston. Alston encouraged him to attend the Harlem Community Art Center, led by sculptor Augusta Savage, who secured a scholarship for Lawrence at the American Artists School and a paid job with the Works Progress Administration. He also studied with Alston and Henry Bannarn at the Alston-Bannarn workshop and at the Harlem Art Workshop in 1937. Lawrence was among the first artists trained within the African-American community in Harlem, and his work consistently explored Black history and struggles. The "hard, bright, brittle" aspects of Depression-era Harlem, along with the colors and patterns in residents' homes, inspired him. He worked with water-based media, creating crisp shapes, bright colors, and dynamic patterns that captured contemporary urban life and historical events.

Early in his career, Lawrence developed his signature method: creating series of paintings that told a story or examined a subject from multiple angles. His first series were biographies of key figures from the African diaspora. At 21, his 41-painting series on Haitian general Toussaint L’Ouverture was shown at the Baltimore Museum of Art. He followed with series on Harriet Tubman (1938–39) and Frederick Douglass (1939–40), along with general depictions of Harlem life and a major series on African-American history (1940–1941). In 1941, he married painter Gwendolyn Knight, who prepared gesso panels for his work and helped write captions for his multi-painting pieces.

Lawrence gained national recognition at age 23 for his 60-panel *Migration Series* (1940–41), which depicted the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North. The series was jointly purchased by the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His works are held in many permanent collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, the 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. His 1947 painting *The Builders* hangs in the White House.