Jacob Lawrence And The Migration of the Negro
What makes Jacob Lawrence's artwork powerful is that it is a voice of Black people and offers a complete view of the African American experience. It goes without saying that Mr. Lawrence presents the lives of his people through highly skilled paintings and artistry, yet he is not only a painter. Because of the material and manner in which Jacob Lawrence paints, he is an activist, storyteller and philosopher. The images in just one of his paintings dare to say what most people are afraid to acknowledge, generate flashbacks and the emotions that accompany flashbacks, and make one dissect and investigate their convictions.Jacob Lawrence was the firs African American artist to receive sustained support from mainstream art museums. Even before he was 21, Mr. Lawrence had made a name for himself as an artist who would reveal and declare the importance of the African American Experience. In 1939 his series of panels of Haitian general, Toussaint L'Overture, was shown in an exhibit of African-American artists so-sponsored by the Harmon Foundation and he Baltimore Museum of Art. (Lewis, pg. 129) Lawrence's narrative series about the dynamic abolitionist Frederick Douglass and angelic free
dom fighter Harriet Tubman soon followed the panels of L'Overture. (Lewis, pg. 130) These biographical compositions were celebrated! Mr. Lawrence provided work that people wanted to see and ideas that people were not familiar with. Because his art was accepted he was able to work in Harlem where he met Claude McKay, Countee Cullen and other artists that fueled the Harlem Renaissance. (Lewis, pg. 130) But the biographical compositions were just the beginning of Lawrence's career as a phenomenal painter. At the Museum of Modern Art, The Migration of the Negro, Panel 50:Race Riot..."manifests the conflicting life that might welcome a Black person who migrates to the North. There the central figures are rioting and holding sticks and whips above their heads as if they are attacking each other. Their angular, straight edged arms stretch diagonally from the lower left corner of the composition to the top right. In the painting there is also a great deal of contrast between the occupied and the empty spaces and the way he arranged the color in those spaces. Like the blue versus the black. Black and blue coats distinguish the White workers from the Black worker. The Black figure is holding a red stick. One of his hands gripping the red stick is yellow. While two of the figures' faces are hidden, the face of an angry White man is overwhelmingly apparent. In 1941, at the age of 24, Jacob Lawrence created the Migration of the Negro. A series of works that he is most widely known for, The Migration of the Negro is an epic narrative series of sixty paintings that he completed in 1941. (Nesbett & Dubois, pg. 128) The series depicts the flight of millions of African Americans from the rural South to the urban north during and after the First World War. What is pow
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Approximate Word count = 1189
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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