Jacob Lawrence was an American painter, born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on September 7, 1917, and died in Seattle on June 9, 2000. He told Black American history in series of small panels painted in flat areas of color, each with a caption he wrote himself.
His best-known work, The Migration Series, is a set of sixty panels painted in 1940 and 1941 about the Great Migration, when millions of Black families left the rural South for Northern cities. It made him famous in his early twenties.
Yet the man who painted that exodus had never been to the South.
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He built the series from two sources. He drew on research and on the southern migrants he knew in Harlem, the New York neighborhood where he grew up.
The other source was closer to home. His own parents had made the journey, and Lawrence later said he became conscious of the migration when he was eight or nine years old. In the series he painted his family's story, as a son who had only heard it told.
Above all, he wanted to be understood at once. In a 1945 interview he said: "I want to communicate. I want the idea to strike right away."
To make sixty pictures read as a single story, he refused to finish them one by one. He worked on all sixty panels at the same time.
Harlem and the Schomburg
Before he painted his family's migration, Lawrence lived a smaller one of his own…
What You'll Discover
The Harlem workshop that trained him.
The revolution he painted first.
How he painted sixty pictures at once.
Why no museum owns all sixty.
The ship where he painted a crew.
The months he spent in a hospital.