We have been looking at Lacob Lawrence's work in our class. Lawrence developed a unique color palette and paint applications that dovetailed perfectly with historic context. You may want to see this rare exhibition if you're in New York.
Reassembling a History Told in Paint
Jacob Lawrence’s Great Migration Series Returns to MoMA
Photo
Panel 58 of Jacob Lawrence’s
1940-41 series about the Great Migration of black people to the North.
Lawrence’s caption for this panel is “In the North the Negro had better
educational facilities.”Credit
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mrs. David M.
Levy. The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation,
Seattle/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. The Museum of Modern
Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY
From
1915 onward, six million black Southerners quit that region for points
north in an epic tide of souls fleeing oppression and seeking
opportunity. This spring, the Museum of Modern Art will honor the Great
Migration’s centennial by reuniting Jacob Lawrence’s famous paintings of
this mass movement, a suite of 60 panels to be shown at MoMA for the
first time since 1994.
The
exhibition is part of an ambitious project to bring fresh perspectives
on the legacy of the migration through new works commissioned from
poets, authors and filmmakers inspired by Lawrence, one of the most
renowned artists of mid-20th-century Modernism.
Isabel Wilkerson, the author of “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,”
the award-winning 2010 book, noted that for many people, Lawrence’s
epic 1940-41 artwork is one of the first introductions to that sweeping
movement north. Politics, housing patterns, food, music — every aspect
of American culture owes something to the migration, Ms. Wilkerson said
in a telephone interview from Atlanta. “Because it’s so big and so
embedded in who we are, it’s hard to see,” she said. “There’s so much to
study — it’s almost like studying 20th-century culture itself.”
Museum
officials will announce the exhibition, “One-Way Ticket: Jacob
Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement
North,” on Wednesday; it will be on display from April 3 through Sept.
7. The series will be the subject of public programs, along with
performances of the poems and interviews with artists and historians.
Lawrence
called the small pictures, in tempera on hardboard panels, “The
Migration of the Negro,” giving each a short caption. A Modernist series
with repeated images of trains, naked trees, flames, labor agents and
fleeing silhouetted figures, it was intended to be exhibited together,
but seldom is.
“For
our audience, it has been 20 years, so a real generation in audience
terms, since they have been here to see this,” Leah Dickerman, the
curator of the exhibition, said of the unified series. The show’s
animating idea, she said, is to highlight the social and artistic
context in which the 23-year-old Lawrence, a Harlem resident, emerged.
His work is “ground zero for history writing in visual form,” she said.
This landmark series was first shown in 1941 by Edith Gregor Halpert at
her Downtown Gallery in New York. After parts of it were reproduced in
Fortune magazine, Lawrence rose instantly to prominence. MoMA and the
collector Duncan Phillips each bought half the panels in 1942. (The
Phillips Collection in Washington is lending its half and will show the
entire series in 2016.)
“One-Way
Ticket” intends to bring that legacy and its interpretations into the
21st century, Ms. Dickerman said, something that seems especially timely
amid nationwide protests about police brutality and racial inequality.
“This
23-year old kid was looking at lynching, voter rights, riots in St.
Louis of all places, the capricious incarceration of black men,” she
said. “This gives us a sense of the long history of these concerns. “
She added: “We’re trying to show Lawrence’s deep, deep engagement with
other contemporary work across mediums. His work is an incredibly
innovative form of political speech.”
Whether
the exhibition will be seen as more celebratory than critical remains
to be seen. Darby English, a new consulting curator in the painting and
sculpture department at MoMA, cautioned in an interview before the show
was assembled (and before he arrived at the museum) against the
“uniformly flat-footed and sentimentalist uses of Jacob Lawrence.”
About
the MoMA show, he said in an email on Tuesday: “I admire Leah immensely
and am extremely positive about the show, which proceeds from a
completely new way to approach Lawrence and this, his most important
work. How? Because the serious, collaborative, multiyear research
process that has accompanied its preparation is exactly what people
HAVEN’T done historically; this alters both the substance and spirit of
the presentation in only the most salutary of ways.”
To
put Lawrence’s work in historical perspective, MoMA will showcase the
work of contemporaries who interpreted the migration, including Richard
Wright and Langston Hughes, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington and Gordon
Parks and Dorothea Lange, as well as painters like Romare Bearden and
Charles White.
Working
with MoMA, the poet Elizabeth Alexander commissioned 10 poets to write
works inspired by Lawrence. She wrote in an email that she wanted to see
how great African-American poets would respond to Lawrence’s work — his
colors and compositions.
In his new poem “Thataway,” Kevin Young wrote, in part:
There were those
of us not ready till good
Jim swung from a tree
& the white folks crowded
the souvenir photo’s frame —
let his body black-
en, the extremities
shorn — not shed,
but skimmed off
so close it can be shaving
almost.
Mr.
Young, a professor of creative writing and English at Emory University,
said he was struck by “Migration” panels that show how people sometimes
lined up hours early to catch an outbound train. “Many of their
journeys were because of opportunity, but many of their journeys were
because of violence,” he said in a telephone interview from Atlanta. He
said the series “tells an epic story of America, the American dream.”
One
of the commissioned works is a children’s book about Lawrence by
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts and Christopher Myers. Mr. Myers, an illustrator,
said his visits to schools and juvenile detention centers made him
realize that children needed to realize that their own lives could give
them models of success beyond what they find in the lyrics and videos of
so much popular music.
“Jacob
Lawrence found inspiration in his locality, the people around him, the
history of which he was a part,” Mr. Myers said in an email. The book,
he said, shows how “art can be integrated into everyday life.”
