35TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION Super Hero JACOB LAWRENCE

Jacob Lawrence 

Jacob Lawrence was an African-American painter and educator who became famous for using vivid blocks of color and a highly formalized style to create dramatic images of African-American historical figures and neighborhoods. Lawrence, admired for narrative series such as the "Migration of the American Negro," used art to explore his cultural heritage and to educate others about the realities of Black life. 

Just before Lawrence died in June 2000, the New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman wrote that he couldn't think of another American artist whose works were so true, modest, and filled with love—even the pieces that tell tragic stories. Howard University art historian Scott Baker lauds Lawrence for his originality and for never compromising his style in a quest for mainstream recognition. 

Lawrence was born in September 1917, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the eldest of three children. His railroad cook father left the family in 1924. The children spent a brief time in foster homes before joining their mother in Harlem when Lawrence was 13. The teen started to get into trouble, so his mother enrolled him in an after-school arts and crafts program at the Utopia Children's Center. There he met his mentor, artist Charles Alston. Lawrence dropped out of school at age 17 to work in a printing shop, but he also took Alston's classes at the Harlem Art Workshops. The budding artist supplemented his education by walking 60 blocks between his home and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he examined the works of the early Italian Renaissance painters. 

Writers such as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison met Lawrence at Alston's studio. The connections he made there helped him get his first federal art project grant. When he was 19, Lawrence produced paintings about life in Harlem during the Great Depression. The works, in somber colors on brown paper, depict scenes of abject poverty, police intimidation, and racial exploitation. Lawrence once remarked that his work depicts events from the many "Harlems" that exist throughout America. The artist said he wanted to show people the happiness and the tragedies that exist in low-income neighborhoods of color. 

In 1937, Lawrence began work on a series on Toussaint L'Ouverture, the Haitian revolutionary, and he followed that narrative with a series on the lives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. Next, Lawrence completed his landmark series of 60 paintings on the "Migration of the American Negro," which chronicles the journey of Southern Blacks to the North in the wake of World War I. Lawrence said these works illustrated the fact that despite the efforts of Blacks to improve their social conditions, African Americans encountered similar problems in both the northern and southern parts of the country. 

At a time when other Black artists were finding it difficult to get shown, Lawrence was exhibiting regularly at the Downtown Gallery in New York City and also at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He began his teaching career at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, later moved to the Pratt Institute, and retired from the University of Washington in Seattle in 1986 as professor emeritus. When he died at home on June 9, 2000, Lawrence was working on paintings for a new exhibition at the Manhattan gallery DC Moore. He was one of the first Black artists to garner sustained mainstream recognition in the United States.

From Great African Americans.  Copyright, Publications International, Ltd.