Jacob Lawrence: The Complete Story
Jacob Lawrence was the American painter who told Black history in series, dozens of small, flat, brightly colored panels that read almost like frames of a film. His Migration Series follows millions leaving the rural South for the cities of the North. He became the first Black artist taken on by a major New York gallery, and his 60 Migration panels now hang split between two great American museums.
He grew up in Harlem in the 1930s, surrounded by writers, musicians and historians, and decided early that his subject would be his own people's story, told plainly enough for anyone to follow.
He became the first Black artist taken on by a major New York gallery, and one of the most important American painters of the 20th century. Here is the whole story.
The story no one had put on museum walls
Lawrence did something almost no one had done before him. He made the sweep of African American history the central subject of serious modern art.
Before him, that story was largely missing from museum walls. He put it there, not as protest posters but as ambitious, carefully composed painting. For me that is his real breakthrough.
What the Migration Series is
In 1941, at just 23, Lawrence finished 60 small panels tracing the Great Migration, the movement of Black families out of the South toward cities like Chicago and New York in the early 20th century.
He painted all 60 at the same time, working one color across every panel before moving to the next, so the whole series would hold together as one. Each panel carries a short caption he wrote himself, turning the set into an illustrated history you read as much as look at.
It made him a star almost overnight. The magazine Fortune published the panels, and a major gallery signed him.
Spotting a Lawrence at a glance
A Lawrence is easy to recognize once you have seen one.
Flat, cut shapes. Figures are simplified into strong, angular blocks of color, almost like paper cut outs.
A tight palette. He often used the same small set of colors across a whole series to bind it together.
Storytelling panels. The work comes in numbered sequences with captions, built to be read in order.
Water based paint. He favored quick, matte, water based paint over slow drying oils.
He worked in quick, matte, water based paint close to gouache. He called his manner dynamic cubism, though its real roots were the patterns and rhythms of Harlem itself. It is a modern kind of history painting, stripped of grandeur and made direct.
The Harlem world that made him
Lawrence was largely shaped by a remarkable community, not an academy.
As a teenager he studied at Harlem art workshops, mentored by the painter Charles Alston and the sculptor Augusta Savage, who helped get him onto a government art program during the Depression so he could paint full time. He soaked up the lectures, libraries and debates of 1930s Harlem.
He also looked to the great Mexican muralists like Orozco and Rivera, who were turning history and ordinary people into monumental art. Lawrence wanted to do the same for Black America, on a more intimate scale.
More than the Migration
Lawrence did not stop at one subject. He built whole series on the heroes of Black freedom.
He painted the lives of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass and the Haitian liberation leader Toussaint Louverture, and later a sweeping sequence called Struggle, on the founding of the United States. He returned again and again to the same idea: history told panel by panel, from below.
The split cycle
The Migration Series became so admired that two major museums each wanted it, and neither would give way.
In the end they split it down the middle. The Museum of Modern Art in New York took the even numbered panels, and the Phillips Collection in Washington took the odd ones. That is why you almost never see all 60 together. The series lives in two cities at once.
The Coast Guard, Gwendolyn Knight, and the years after
Jacob Lawrence was born in 1917 in Atlantic City and moved to Harlem as a boy. In 1941 he married the painter Gwendolyn Knight, his partner for the rest of his life.
He served in the Coast Guard in the Second World War, on one of the first racially integrated ships, and kept painting.
He struggled with depression and spent time in a hospital in the late 1940s, even making a series of works about it. For decades he also taught, settling in Seattle as a professor at the University of Washington.
How Jacob Lawrence died
Lawrence kept working and teaching into old age, widely honored as an elder of American art.
He died in Seattle in 2000, at 82, from cancer. By then his reputation was secure, his panels in the country's greatest museums.
Where Lawrence's panels live
Because he worked in series, his panels are spread across several great collections.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Holds the even numbered panels of The Migration Series.
The Phillips Collection, Washington. Holds the odd numbered panels of the same series.
The Seattle Art Museum. Strong holdings in the city where he taught for decades.
The Migration Series is split between MoMA in New York and the Phillips Collection in Washington. The Metropolitan Museum of Art also holds his work.
How he painted a whole series at once
Lawrence worked in a way almost no one else did. When he made a series of dozens of panels, he did not finish them one at a time. He laid them all out together and painted them in stages.
He would mix a single color, then carry it across every panel in the group, adding all the black, then all the red, then all the brown, before moving to the next tone. This kept the whole series bound into one visual key.
He used flat, quick drying paints like tempera and casein on smooth hardboard, not oil. The method gave his cycles their unity and their poster like punch. He called the style his own kind of dynamic cubism.
The early heroes: Toussaint, Tubman and Douglass
Before the famous Migration Series, Lawrence was already telling history in panels. As a very young man in the late 1930s he painted the life of Toussaint Louverture, the leader of the Haitian revolution, in forty one small scenes.
He followed with series on Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, and later on the abolitionist John Brown. Each told the story of a Black freedom struggle that most textbooks skipped.
He did his research in the library, then compressed a whole life into a run of sharp, simple images with captions. The approach he perfected on these heroes prepared him for the great work to come.
The Struggle series
In the mid 1950s Lawrence began an ambitious cycle called Struggle, drawn from the history of the American people. He planned dozens of panels covering the early republic, its promises and its violence.
He never finished the full sweep he imagined, and over the years the individual panels scattered into different hands. Some were thought lost for decades.
In recent years scholars and museums have hunted them down and reunited many of them in traveling shows. A few were rediscovered in private homes, hanging unrecognized on ordinary walls.
The year in the hospital
Success came young and hard. In 1949, worn down and depressed, Lawrence checked himself into Hillside Hospital in Queens for treatment that lasted about a year.
Rather than stop working, he painted what he saw around him. The Hospital series records the wards, the patients and the routines of the place with the same clear eye he gave to history.
He came out steadier and kept working for another five decades. The episode is a reminder that behind the calm, ordered panels stood a man who knew real strain.
The subway mosaic and the public walls
Lawrence did not keep his art inside frames. In his later years he designed large public works meant to live in the flow of daily life.
His mosaic mural New York in Transit, installed in 2001 in the Times Square subway station, shows crowds of riders in his familiar flat shapes and strong color, greeting millions of commuters a year.
From 1971 he also taught at the University of Washington in Seattle, shaping younger artists. He died in Seattle in 2000, honored as one of the great American painters of his century.
Jacob Lawrence and the Migration, answered
What is he known for? The Migration Series, 60 panels on the Great Migration.
When and where was he born? In 1917, in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
What medium did he use? Fast drying water based paint, close to gouache, on board.
Why is he important? He made Black American history a central subject of serious modern art.
How did he die? Of cancer, in Seattle, in 2000, aged 82.
If Lawrence drew you in, these are worth your time too:
Faith Ringgold, who told Black American stories in painted story quilts.
Kehinde Wiley, who puts Black sitters into the grand poses of European art.
The Old Masters Were Women Too, on who art history left out of the frame.