The Migration of the Negro: Sixty Panels by Jacob Lawrence, April 16-May 6, 1943

“The Migration Series,” originally titled “The Migration of the Negro,” is a group of paintings by American painter Jacob Lawrence which depicts the migration of African Americans to the northern United States from the South that began in the 1910s. It was published in 1941 and funded by the Works Progress Administration.

Jacob Armstead Lawrence was born on September 7, 1917 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where his parents had migrated from the rural south. They divorced in 1924 and he was put into foster care in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. At age 13, he moved to Harlem, New York City to reconnect with his mother. Lawrence was introduced to art shortly after that when their mother enrolled him in after-school classes at an arts and crafts settlement house in Harlem, called Utopia Children's Center.

After dropping out of school at 16, Lawrence worked in a laundromat and a printing plant. Though, he continued with art by attending classes at the Harlem Art Workshop, taught by the noted African-American artist Charles Alston. Savage secured a scholarship to the American Artists School for Lawrence and a paid position with the New Deal Program Works Progress Administration. Lawrence continued his studies with Alston and Henry Bannarn, another Harlem Renaissance artist, in the Alston-Bannarn workshop. He also studied at Harlem Art Workshop in New York in 1937. Of note, Lawrence was one of the first artists trained in and by the African-American community in Harlem. Throughout his lengthy artistic career, he concentrated on exploring the history and struggles of African Americans.

From the beginning of his career, he had developed the approach that made his reputation and remained his touchstone: creating serieses of paintings that told a story or, less often, depicted many aspects of a subject. His first were biographical accounts of key figures of the African diaspora. He was just 21 years old when his series of 41 paintings of the Haitian general Toussaint L’Ouverture was shown in an exhibit of African-American artists at the Baltimore Museum of Art. This was followed by a series of paintings of the lives of Harriet Tubman (1938-1939) and Frederick Douglass (1939-1940). Both of which were shown at the de Young museum in 1993. On July 24, 1941, Lawrence married the painter Gwendolyn Knight, also a student of Savage.

Lawrence created the sixty paintings in the “Great Migration” series in 1940-1941 when he was 23 years old, with funding from the Works Progress Administration. The series is based on the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural south to the urban north that began in the 1910s. The early part of the migration ran through 1930 and numbered some 1.6 million people. The panels depict the dire state of black life in the South, with poor wages, economic hardship due to the boll weevil, and a justice system rigged against them. The North offered better wages and slightly more rights, although it was not without its problems. Living conditions were much more crowded in the cities, which led to new threats such as tuberculosis outbreaks. The final panel notes that the migration continues. Migrants were still moving north in the 1950s and 1960s. The series was collected and exhibited in Washington D.C. in 1993 and retitled from ""The Migration of the Negro"" to ""The Migration Series"" and almost all of the captions were rewritten. Today, the sixty panels are shared between the Museum of Modern Art in New York who has 30 panels and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. who owns the other 30, the split that happened in 1942.

In October 1943, during World War II, Lawrence was drafted into the United States Coast Guard and served as a public affairs specialist with the first racially integrated crew on the USCGC Sea Cloud, under Carlton Skinner. He continued to paint and sketch while in the Coast Guard, documenting the experience of war around the world. He produced 48 paintings during this time, all of which have been lost. In 1945, he was awarded a fellowship in the fine arts by the Guggenheim Foundation. In 1946, Josef Albers recruited Lawrence to join the faculty of the summer art program at Black Mountain College. Returning to New York, Lawrence continued to paint but grew depressed and, in 1949 checked himself into Hillside Hospital in Queens. While there, he produced his Hospital Series. Between 1954 and 1956 Lawrence produced a series called ""Struggle: From the History of the American People"" that depicted historical scenes from 1775 to 1817. The series includes references to current events as well as exploring relatively obscure or neglected aspects of American history. Rather than traditional titles, Lawrence labeled each panel with a quote.

The Brooklyn Museum of Art mounted a retrospective exhibition of his work in 1960. In 1969, he was among 200 Black artists in a premier show sponsored by the Philadelphia School District and the Pennsylvania Civic Center Museum. Lawrence also illustrated several works for children. “Harriet and the Promised Land” appeared in 1968 and used his series of paintings that told the story of Harriet Tubman. Two similar volumes based on his “John Brown” and “Great Migration"" series followed. He created illustrations for a selection of 18 of Aesop's Fables in 1970, and then the full set of 23 tales were published in 1998.

Lawrence taught at several schools after his first teaching at Black Mountain College, including the New School for Social Research, the Art Students League, Pratt Institute, and the Skowhegan School. He became a visiting artist at the University of Washington in 1970 and was professor of art there from 1971 to 1986. Shortly after moving to Washington state, Lawrence did a series of five paintings on the westward journey of African-American pioneer George Washington Bush. He undertook several major commissions in this part of his career. In 1980, he completed “Exploration,” a mural made of porcelain on steel, comprising a dozen panels devoted to academic endeavors. He produced another series in 1983 of eight screen prints called the “Hiroshima Series,” printings of which are in the permanent collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Lawrence's painting “Theater” was commissioned by the University of Washington in 1985. The Whitney Museum of American Art produced an exhibition of Lawrence's entire career in 1974, as did the Seattle Art Museum in 1986. In 1999, he and his wife established the Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation for the creation, presentation, and study of American art, with a particular emphasis on work by African-American artists. It represents their estates and maintains a searchable archive of nearly a thousand images of their work. Lawrence continued to paint until a few weeks before his death in Seattle, Washington on June 9, 2000.

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Lawrence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_Series