Phillips collection jacob lawrence biography

Jacob Lawrence is most widely known for the Migration of the Negro, an epic narrative series of sixty paintings that he completed in 1941 at the age of twenty-four.

The series, which was painted in bright tempera paints on small hardboard panels–all of which are accompanied by captions—depicts the flight of millions of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North during and after the first World War.

The series is a unique blend of sensibilities, part mural painting, part social realism, and part modernist abstraction.

Lawrence painted the series while he was living in a run-down studio building on 125th Street in New York City that lacked heat or running water.

Several months later, twenty-six of the panels were published in color in Fortune magazine, launching the artist’s career. In an unusual response to the institutional demand for the work, Lawrence agreed to a joint purchase by the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., and the