Lawrence, Jacob Armstead

Source:

 African American National Biography

Lawrence, Jacob Armstead

(7 Sept. 1917–9 June 2000),

artist and teacher, was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to migrant parents. His father, Jacob Lawrence, a railroad cook, was from South Carolina, and his mother, Rose Lee Armstead, hailed from Virginia. In 1919 the family moved to Pennsylvania, where Jacob's sister, Geraldine, was born. Five years later Jacob's brother, William, was born, and his parents separated.

Jacob Armstead Lawrence on 31 July 1941. (Library of Congress. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten.)

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Jacob moved with his mother, sister, and brother to a Manhattan apartment on West 143d Street in 1930. Upon his arrival in Harlem, the teenage Lawrence began taking neighborhood art classes. His favorite teacher was the painter Charles Alston, who taught at the Harlem Art Workshop. This workshop, sponsored by the Works Progress Administration, was first housed in the central Harlem branch of the New York Public Library before relocating to Alston's studio at 306 West 141st Street. Many community cultural workers had studios in this spacious building. Affectionately called “306,” Alston's studio in particular was a vital gathering place for creative people. Lawrence met Alain Locke, Aaron Douglas, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison at his mentor's lively studio.

In 1935, at age eighteen, Lawrence started painting scenes of Harlem using poster paint and brown paper. Initially chosen for their accessibility and low cost, these humble materials would remain central to the artist's work. The next year Lawrence began what would become his ritual of doing background research for his art projects at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library (now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture). Inspired after seeing W. E. B. Du Bois's play Haiti at Harlem's Lafayette Theatre in 1936, he began researching the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). This eye-opening research culminated in a powerful series of forty-one paintings titled The Life of Toussaint L'Ouverture. Completed in 1938, this series dramatically visualized the life of the formerly enslaved man who led the Haitian struggle for independence from France and the creation of the world's first black republic. These paintings also signaled paths the artist would continue to explore in his work, namely, figurative expressionism, history painting, sequential narration, and prose captions. Moreover, the ambitious cycle revealed Lawrence's deep interest in heroism and struggles for freedom.

In September 1938 Augusta Savage, the sculptor and influential director of the Harlem Community Art Center, helped Lawrence gain work as an easel painter on the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project. During his eighteen months as a government-employed artist, Lawrence probably produced about thirty-six paintings. In addition, he worked on two more dramatic biographies of freedom fighters. In 1939 he completed The Life of Frederick Douglass series. Based on the famous abolitionist's autobiography, the thirty-two painted panels—each accompanied by text—chart the heroic transformation of the escaped slave into a fiery orator and an uncompromising activist. The following year Lawrence completed The Life of Harriet Tubman series. Composed of thirty-one panels, this epic visual and textual narrative features the courageous female conductor of the Underground Railroad. Both series were exhibited at the Library of Congress in 1940 in commemoration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

In 1941, at age twenty-four, Lawrence completed his signature narrative series, The Migration of the Negro, a group of sixty tempera paintings illustrating the mass movement of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North. This historical cycle was done in a modern visual style with its emphasis on strong lines, simplified forms, geometric shapes, flat planes, bold colors, and recurrent motifs. Gwendolyn Knight, a Barbados-born and Harlem-based artist, helped Lawrence complete the project by assisting with the preparation of the sixty hardboard panels and the accompanying prose captions. The creative couple married in New York on 24 July 1941, shortly after completing this pivotal work. Lawrence's Migration series brought him wide public recognition and critical acclaim. Twenty-six of the panels were reproduced in Fortune magazine in November 1941. Simultaneously, New York's prestigious Downtown Gallery exhibited the cycle, and, soon after the show opened, Edith Halpert, the gallery's owner, asked Lawrence to join her roster of prominent American artists, which included Ben Shahn, Stuart Davis, and Charles Sheeler. Lawrence accepted Halpert's offer, making him the first artist of African descent to be represented by a downtown gallery. A few months later the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) purchased half the Migration series, and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., bought the other half, marking the first acquisition of works by an African American artist at either institution. In October 1942 MOMA organized a two-year, fifteen-venue national tour of the acclaimed series.

During World War II, Lawrence served in the U.S. Coast Guard, where he continued to paint. In 1944 a group of his paintings based on life at sea was exhibited at MoMA. The following year, while he was still on active duty, Lawrence successfully applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship to begin work on a series devoted to the crisis of war. The fourteen somber panels that make up his War series were first shown at the New Jersey State Museum in 1947, and Time magazine touted the series as “by far his best work yet” (Time 50 [22 Dec. 1947], 61).

Lawrence began his distinguished career as a teacher in 1946 when the former Bauhaus artist Josef Albers invited him to teach the summer session at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Until his retirement in 1983 Lawrence was a highly sought-after teacher. He taught at numerous schools, including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, Brandeis University in Massachusetts, Pratt Institute, the Art Students League, and the New School for Social Research in New York City. From 1970 to 1983 Lawrence was a full professor of art at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Lawrence's first retrospective began in 1960. Organized by the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the show traveled to sixteen sites across the country. The artist had two other traveling career retrospectives during his lifetime: one organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974, and another organized by the Seattle Art Museum in 1986.

During the civil rights movement, Lawrence visually captured the challenges of the freedom struggle of blacks in works such as Two Rebels (1963). His first venture into limited-edition printmaking, Two Rebels dramatized the struggle between black protesters and white policemen through lithography. Over the next three decades the artist would also experiment with other printmaking techniques, such as drypoint, etching, and silkscreen.

In 1962 Lawrence traveled to Nigeria, where he lectured on the influence of traditional West African sculpture on modernist art and exhibited his work in Lagos and Ibadan. Two years later the artist and his wife returned to Nigeria for eight months, to experience life in West Africa and to create work based on their stay.

After working primarily as a painter and a printmaker, Lawrence expanded his range in the late 1970s by also making murals. He received his first mural commission in 1979 when he was hired to create a work for Seattle's Kingdome stadium. He created a ten-panel work titled Games. Made of porcelain enamel on steel, the 91⁄2-foot ¥ 71⁄2-foot mural features powerful athletes surrounded by adoring fans. This mural, which was relocated to the Washington State Convention Center in 2000, was followed by others at Howard University (1980, 1984), the University of Washington (1984), the Orlando International Airport (1988), the Joseph Addabbo Federal Building in Queens (1988), and the Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago (1991). The artist's final mural, a 72-foot-long mosaic commissioned by New York City's Metropolitan Transit Authority, was posthumously unveiled in the Times Square subway station in 2001.

When Jacob Lawrence died at home in Seattle at age eighty-two, he was exploring a theme that had captured his imagination at the beginning of his sixty-five-year artistic career. Lawrence was still painting pictures of laborers, their movements and constructions, and their tools. A collection of hand tools—hammers, chisels, planes, rulers, brushes, and a Pullman porter's bed wrench—graced his studio and inspired his work. Concerning his prized collection, the artist explained: “For me, tools became extensions of hands, and movement. Tools are like sculptures. You look at old paintings and you see in them the same tools we use today. Tools are eternal. And I also enjoy the illusion when I paint them: you know, making something that is about making something” (Kimmelman, 210–211).

Jacob Lawrence's lifelong interest in representing work and workers befits a man who left behind a monumental body of work—approximately seven hundred paintings, one hundred prints, eight murals, and hundreds of drawings, studies, and sketches. One of the most widely admired African American artists, he was passionately committed to employing his own expressive tools to creatively visualize historical struggles and modern American life.

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