In commemoration of the 100th anniversary of artist Jacob Lawrence’s birth, the Seattle Art Museum presents Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series. The exhibit, which will run from Jan. 21 – April 23, 2017, will feature all 60 panels of Lawrence’s masterwork The Migration Series—depicting the exodus of African Americans from the rural south between World War I and World War II. The panels will be shown together for the first time in more than two decades on the West Coast.
In 1941, Jacob Lawrence, then just 23 years old and living in Harlem, completed a series of 60 paintings about the Great Migration, the mass movement of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North in the decades between World War I and World War II. This was his community’s story, told in images and words in poignant detail. Lawrence’s epic work stands as a landmark in the history of modern art that remains relevant today.
Lawrence exhibited the series at the famous Downtown Gallery in Manhattan in 1941. Two institutions expressed interest in the series, and it was divided between them: the Phillips acquired the odd-numbered panels, and MoMA acquired the even-numbered panels.
The Phillips Collection is exhibiting the complete series this fall, and MoMA did so last year, bringing new attention to this important work more than 75 years since its creation. The two museums agreed to lend the combined series to the Seattle Art Museum so that it could be seen in Lawrence’s other home city. Jacob Lawrence and his wife, artist Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence, moved to Seattle in 1971 when Jacob accepted a position at the University of Washington, where he taught until he retired in 1986.
Lawrence conceived of The Migration Series as a single work of art, painting on all 60 panels at the same time to achieve unity of form and color. The complete work appears like a large mural painting, an art form that Lawrence admired and that gained new attention in the late 1930s and 1940s, thanks to government sponsorship and the role that public art was given in bringing the U.S. out of the Great Depression.
Fittingly, SAM will install the series like a mural on the walls of its Gwendolyn Knight & Jacob Lawrence Gallery, which was created to honor their enduring gifts to the city. The Lawrences were generous supporters of the museum and the arts throughout the region—an immense legacy that continues to this day.
“We are deeply honored to present this extraordinary series in its entirety,” says Kimerly Rorschach, SAM’s Illsley Ball Nordstrom Director and CEO. “We’re grateful to MoMA and the Phillips for making this possible.” Adds Patricia Junker, SAM’s Ann M. Barwick Curator of American Art, “The Migration Series is a revelatory monument of early modern American art. Now is an extraordinary moment to return to it—the themes of social justice it explores are timeless.”
“It is fitting and timely that Jacob Lawrence, great American Painter, be celebrated by those of us who knew and loved him,” says Barbara Earl Thomas, artist and Vice President of the Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation. “But even more exciting is to know that generations of young people will have their first glimpse of his work, as they step into an epic story of American history, told in a cinematic sweep by a master painter full of passionate humanity.”
