Jacob Lawrence

Jacob Lawrence: Painting the Great Migration at Twenty-Three

Jacob Lawrence was twenty-three years old, had never had formal academic training beyond after-school art classes in Harlem, and had never seen the rural South his own parents fled — and in 1941 he completed a sixty-panel narrative sequence on that migration so authoritative that Fortune magazine ran twenty-six of the panels and two of New York's most important museums split ownership of the whole series rather than let either lose it. He would spend the next six decades painting African American history and urban life in a visual language he invented himself, but he never again matched the impact of that single, career-launching sequence made before he was old enough to rent a car.

Foster Care to Harlem

Jacob Armstead Lawrence was born September 7, 1917, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to parents who had migrated north from the rural South before his birth — his own origin story, in other words, was the Great Migration itself. His parents divorced in 1924, and his mother placed Lawrence and his two younger siblings in foster care in Philadelphia. At thirteen he was reunited with her in Harlem, where she enrolled him in after-school classes at the Utopia Children's Center, his first exposure to formal art instruction. He continued at the Harlem Art Workshop under painter Charles Alston, and, with a scholarship secured for him by sculptor Augusta Savage, at the Harlem Community Art Center. He also studied at the American Artists School and worked a paid position through the Works Progress Administration during the Depression — federal relief programs that, for a generation of Black artists without access to conventional academies, functioned as their real art school.

Dynamic Cubism

Out of this patchwork training Lawrence developed a style he called "dynamic cubism," drawing on West African and Meso-American visual traditions rather than the European modernism most of his contemporaries studied. Working primarily in tempera, he built compositions from crisp, flattened shapes, saturated color, and figures caught in emphatic, gesture-driven poses — a visual grammar built for narrative sequence rather than single-image drama. He described his own standard plainly: "For me, a painting should have three things: universality, clarity and strength. Clarity and strength so that it may be aesthetically good. Universality so that it may be understood by all men." His teacher Charles Alston, reviewing his student's early tempera work, called it "a richness and brilliance of color harmonies both remarkable and exciting" achieved within what he considered a limited medium.

The Migration Series

Lawrence had already completed narrative series on Toussaint L'Ouverture (41 panels, age 21), Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass before turning, in 1940–41, to a subject with no single historical hero: the mass movement of roughly six million African Americans from the rural South to the industrial North following World War I. The result, originally titled "The Migration of the Negro" and now known simply as *The Migration Series*, comprises 60 tempera panels on composite board, structured around a recurring palette of blue-green, orange, yellow, and gray-brown, and organized as a train journey moving station by station northward. Twenty-six panels appeared in Fortune magazine in November 1941, and the complete series debuted that year at Edith Halpert's Downtown Gallery. The work proved historically important enough that the Phillips Collection in Washington and the Museum of Modern Art in New York jointly purchased and now jointly own it, alternating the odd- and even-numbered panels between their collections. MoMA's chief curator Kirk Varnedoe later credited the series with "Mr. Lawrence's pioneering role," noting that "such engaged creativity has deep roots in earlier twentieth-century art" — a way of saying Lawrence had done something genuinely new with a tradition still forming under him.

War, Hospitalization, and Later Series

Drafted into the Coast Guard in October 1943, Lawrence served as a public affairs specialist aboard the USCGC Sea Cloud, the first racially integrated crew in the U.S. armed forces, producing 48 wartime paintings that were subsequently lost during demobilization. In 1949 he voluntarily admitted himself for psychiatric treatment, an experience that generated his unsettling Hospital Series. He returned repeatedly to historical narrative across the following decades — the 22-panel John Brown series (1941–42, later reissued as silkscreen prints in 1977), the 30-panel *Struggle: From the History of the American People* (1954–56), an eight-print Hiroshima series (1983), and a Genesis series (1990) — while also completing *The Builders* (1947), which now hangs in the White House Green Room.

Teaching

Lawrence taught for most of his adult life, beginning with a 1946 summer session at Black Mountain College at the invitation of Josef Albers, and later holding positions at the New School, the Art Students League, Pratt Institute, and the Skowhegan School. From 1971 to 1986 he was a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, accumulating sixteen years there in total between his 1970 visiting appointment and retirement — the institution that shaped his final decades and where he remained based until his death.

Why Jacob Is Called a Genius

The claim for Lawrence rests on a specific and well-documented achievement: inventing a coherent narrative painting style — his own "dynamic cubism," fusing West African and Meso-American visual sources rather than borrowing wholesale from European modernism — and using it, at just 23, to complete the most historically ambitious visual account of the Great Migration that existed at the time, without any academic training comparable to his white contemporaries. MoMA's own chief curator called the achievement "pioneering," language reserved for artists credited with genuine formal innovation rather than skillful execution of existing styles. The honest complication is that Lawrence himself was shaped almost entirely by Depression-era community institutions — the WPA, Augusta Savage's scholarship program, the Harlem Art Workshop — rather than working in isolation, so his originality is better understood as the product of a specific, historically unrepeatable ecosystem of Black artistic mentorship than of a solitary singular mind. It is also fair to note that no later series, across nearly sixty more years of steady, well-regarded work, matched the *Migration Series* for either ambition or impact, suggesting the "genius" label may attach most precisely to one extraordinary early achievement rather than to an unbroken career of comparable leaps.

Legacy

Lawrence received the NAACP's Spingarn Medal in 1970, the National Medal of Arts in 1990, and eighteen honorary degrees from institutions including Harvard and Yale, alongside memberships in the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He died June 9, 2000, in Seattle. His work now hangs in more than fifty major museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney, the British Museum, and the Vatican Museums. In 1999 he and his wife, the painter Gwendolyn Knight, established the Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation to support American art with an emphasis on Black artists, and the Seattle Art Museum continues to award an annual fellowship in their names to emerging artists of color.

Achievements

• Spingarn Medal — 1970
• National Medal of Arts
• Notable work: Builders No. 1
• Notable work: New York in Transit
• Movement: social realism