Jacob Lawrence Went Beyond the Constraints of a Segregated Art World
Jacob Lawrence was one of twentieth-century America’s most celebrated black artists. In Struggle, his series of paintings on the American Revolution, he opened up new territory in American history by venturing beyond the narrow set of topics like Harlem, jazz clubs, and cotton plantations which had become synonymous with black art in mid-century America.
Jacob Lawrence was an American painter who grew up in Harlem. (Wikimedia Commons)
Leftists have a fraught relationship with the American Revolution. Today, it is mostly a site of vacuous patriotism, its themes appropriated by the Tea Party and recently echoed in the rhetoric of the Trump supporters who broke into the Capitol chanting “1776.”
Since the first stirrings of conflict between Britain and the colonists, American radicals have pointed out the hypocrisy of the revolutionary elite who demanded equality for themselves while holding people in bondage. It is perhaps surprising, then, that Jacob Lawrence, the celebrated painter of the black working class, took up this history in a thirty-painting series entitled Struggle: From the History of the American People.
Born in Atlantic City and raised in Harlem, Lawrence got his start as a Works Progress Administration–sponsored artist during the New Deal. A creator of intimately scaled history paintings during a period when monumentality and abstraction was dominant in art, his best known work, the sixty-panel Migration Series, addresses the mass movement of African Americans from the rural south into northern cities and the resulting social, cultural, and economic changes to black life.
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