Jacob Lawrence, one of the most important artists of the 20th century, was born in 1917 and is best known for his series of narrative paintings depicting important moments in African American history. Lawrence was introduced to art when in his early teens, Lawrence’s mother enrolled him in Utopia Children’s Center, which provided an after-school art program in Harlem. By the mid-1930s, he was regularly participating in art programs at the Harlem Art Workshop and the Harlem Community Art Center where he was exposed to leading African American artists of the time, including Augusta Savage and Charles Alton, the director of the Harlem Art Workshop and, later, professor of art at Howard University. At the community art centers, Lawrence studied African art, Aaron Douglas’s paintings and African American history. With the help and encouragement of Augusta Savage, Lawrence secured a scholarship to the American Artists School and later gained employment with the WPA, working as a painter in the easel division. Lawrence began painting in series format in the late 1930s, completing 41 paintings on the life of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the revolutionary who established the Haitian Republic. Other series followed on the lives of the abolitionists Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and John Brown. The Migration of the Negro, one of his best known series, was completed in 1941. The most widely acclaimed African American artist of this century, Lawrence continued to paint until his death in 2000.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/aaworld/arts/lawrence.html
Jacob Lawrence was born in Atlantic City but was brought up in a settlement house in Harlem. This was the period of the Harlem Renaissance, a time of sharply focused social awareness and a burgeoning black consciousness, which nurtured the young Lawrence and opened his eyes to the life around him. He began taking art lessons early, and during the Depression, he worked for the WPA.
It was his own background in Harlem and the hard life of black Americans that informed Lawrence’s earliest work. His Migration Series, supported by grants from the Rosenwald Foundation, was an immediate success and brought the twenty-four year-old to national attention. Lawrence continued to work in series-possibly reflecting the oral tradition of the black community-and the individual images, while powerful on their own, have connective strength when viewed as a narrative. Never one to shy away from human suffering, no matter how close to home, Lawrence did Hillside Hospital Series based on his stay at the psychiatric hospital in 1949¬50.
