Tools As Art: The Hechinger Collection

Collection Database

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

← →

Jacob Lawrence, Carpenters, 1977
lithograph
18 x 22 in.

Jacob Lawrence was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1917. He moved with his family to Easton, Pennsylvania, and to Philadelphia before settling in Harlem, New York, in 1931, when he began studying with the painter Charles Alson at the WPA Harlem Art Workshop. In 1936 he was awarded a scholarship to the American Artists' School in New York City, and in 1938 he was hired by the WPA Federal Art Project. During this period the artist began his best-known series, "The Migration," which he completed in 1941. Consisting of sixty panels with accompanying texts, the series depicts the movements of African-Americans from the farms and rural communities of the South to the industrial cities of the North after World War I. "The Migration" was exhibited at the Downtown Gallery, New York, and then was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. In 1943 Lawrence was drafted into the Coast Guard. He was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1946; that same year he produced the "War" series. In 1947 Fortune magazine commissioned him to paint a series of ten images of the South after World War II, for which Walker Evans wrote an accompanying text. Lawrence revisited the migration theme in a series of illustrations he did for a book of poetry by Langston Huges, One-way Ticket. Lawrence, who has been described as a painter of the American scene, an American modernist, and a social realist, was given his first retrospective, at the Brooklyn Museum, in 1960, and has since had numerous exhibitions around the world. Lawrence moved to Seattle, Washington, in 1970. This chronicler of American life began his most recent series, "Builders," in the mid-1970s.