Jacob Lawrence

Jacob Armstead Lawrence was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on the seventh of September 1917, the son of Southern Black migrants who had come north in the Great Migration. The family moved to Harlem in 1930. Lawrence took art lessons at the Utopia Children's Center under Charles Alston and at the Harlem Community Art Center under Augusta Savage (also placed in this archive) through his teens.

In 1940-41 — at twenty-three — Lawrence completed The Migration Series, a sixty-panel sequential painting cycle on the Black migration from the rural South to the urban North between 1910 and 1940. The series was acquired jointly by the Museum of Modern Art (panels 1-30, odd-numbered) and the Phillips Collection in Washington (panels 2-60, even-numbered) in November 1942 — the first acquisition of an entire painting cycle by a Black artist by either institution. Lawrence was the first African American artist to be represented by a major New York gallery (the Edith Halpert Downtown Gallery, 1941-49).

He produced over twenty further sequential painting series across the next six decades: Toussaint L'Ouverture (1938), Frederick Douglass (1939), Harriet Tubman (1940), John Brown (1941, all from the early Migration period), The Life of Theodore Roosevelt (1944, painted in the Coast Guard during the Second World War), and the late-career John Brown Series (1977) and Genesis (1989).

He taught at the New School (1955-71), the Skowhegan School of Painting (1963-65), and the University of Washington (1971-86, where he was the founding professor of the Black Arts Program).

He died in Seattle on the ninth of June 2000, age eighty-two. The Phillips Collection and MoMA reunited The Migration Series in joint exhibition for the first time in 2015.

He is honored here as the painter whose sixty-panel Migration Series remains the central visual representation of the Great Migration.