Jacob Lawrence
1917–2000 · history painter and African American social realist
Jacob Lawrence (Atlantic City, New Jersey, 1917 - Seattle, Washington, 2000) was an American painter associated with social realism and one of the best-known African American artists of the twentieth century. He is often described as a history painter, although he preferred to call himself an expressionist and described his style as "dynamic cubism." His main influence was less French art than the forms and colours of the Harlem Renaissance. Along with Romare Bearden, he is among the most widely known African American painters of his time.
After his parents separated, he moved at thirteen with his mother and two brothers to New York City. In Harlem, a settlement house enrolled him in arts and crafts classes to keep him occupied, and a teacher there recognised his talent. After leaving school at sixteen, he studied with Charles Alston and, on Alston's advice, attended the centre run by the sculptor Augusta Savage, who secured him a scholarship to the American Artists School and a job with the Works Progress Administration. In 1941 he married the painter Gwendolyn Knight, also a student of Savage, and they remained married until his death.
Lawrence focused on the history and struggles of African Americans. At twenty-one, he showed a series on the Haitian general Toussaint L'Ouverture at the Baltimore Museum of Art, followed by works on Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and John Brown. At just twenty-three he completed his most celebrated set, sixty narrative panels titled Migration of the Negro, which depict the movement of hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North. Shown in New York, the series brought him national recognition. In 1943 he joined the Coast Guard and served on one of the first racially integrated crews. He settled in Seattle in 1970 and taught at the University of Washington from 1971 until 1986, and he kept painting until a few weeks before his death. His final public work, the mosaic mural New York in Transit, was installed in 2001 in a Times Square subway station.