MANHATTAN - HARLEM

Olga Sinanidi

Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series

Material for this section has been based on information provided by MoMA and The Phillips Collection.

Harlem is a neighborhood in Upper Manhattan, New York City. African Americans began to arrive in large numbers during the Great Migration in the 20th century. In the 1920s and 1930s, Central and West Harlem were the center of the Harlem Renaissance, a major African-American cultural movement. With job losses during the Great Depression of the 1930s and the deindustrialization of New York City after World War II, rates of crime and poverty increased significantly.

picture exists on public domain

picture exists on public domain

Gordon Parks, one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century, took an array of photographs in Harlem during the months bridging 1943 and 1944. He often approached his subjects from below, placing the buildings that framed their lives as backgrounds rising behind them, and attempted to catch people looking askance in ways that suggest resilience.

Jacob Lawrence was born on September 7, 1917, in Atlantic City, New Jersey. He moved with his family from the South to the North at a young age, during the Great Migration. He lived in Easton, Pennsylvania until 1924. He spent three years in foster care and in 1930, Rose Lee, his mother brought him in Harlem, New York.

picture exists on public domain

The first panel of his sixty-panel series, represents a crowd of African Americans in a train station squeezing in order to reach the ticket windows leading to Chicago, New York and St. Louis. These key destinations were their passport to new economic opportunities that the South would offer them. This demographic transformation led to the alternation of the urban space as well, since this population brought its own individual culture as regard to music, literature and art in general. The act of moving is a motif in Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series. The continual movement led approximately three million African Americans to leave the South by 1950.

Panel 1: During World War I there was a great migration north by southern African Americans.

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Lawrence on his familial ties to the Migration Series.

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In panel 58, three African American girls write on the black board, suggesting that in the South education was considered to be a part in childhood. Jacob Lawrence himself had the opportunity to be educated and become a leading figure in art. While living and studying in Harlem, Lawrence met his mentor Charles Alston, an artist and teacher. Influenced by Alston and African American experience, he rented a studio and started painting. Harlem’s shapes and colors influenced his style. In 1941, he was the first African American artist to be represented by a New York gallery. The gallerist Edith Halpert exhibited the Migration Series in her Downtown Gallery, in New York, twice in 1941.

Panel 58: In the North the African American had more educational opportunities.

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Jacob Lawrence about Panel 58

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Panel 31: The migrants found improved housing when they arrived north.

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The geometric shapes of the tenements created a new visual experience for Jacob Lawrence. He expressed his interpretation of the urban space as “a dance, a musical composition that appears over and over again”. Panel 31 depicts three building facades one next to the other. The multiple, irregularly painted windows represent the overpopulated tenements.

Jacob Lawrence about Panel 31

video exists on public domain

In panel 47, Lawrence depicts the interior of the tenement building. In the featureless space of the shared residence, the colorful pillows and quilts state the efforts made by residents to enliven their surroundings. Lawrence explained in a 1922 interview: “We lived in a deep depression. Not only my mother, but the poor people in general, in order to add something to our lives, they decorated their tenements and their homes in all of these colors … my artistic sensibility came from this ambiance. … It’s only in retrospect that I realized that I was surrounded by art.”

Panel 47: As the migrant population grew, good housing became scarce. Workers were forced to live in overcrowded and dilapidated tenement houses.

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According to MoMA, Harlem in New York City was densely populated, since political and economic forces constrained African American residents to settle there. Jacob Lawrence, delivers the sense of constraint and containment through the vertical and horizontal lines of the bed frames. The discriminatory practices made African American Harlemites to spend at least forty percent of their wages on rent, by the early 1930s, that is more than the average New Yorker paid for housing. The racialized ways African American residents were treated made Harlem a heterotopic space: paying the rent did not ensure having a humane and secure home to begin their new lives.

Panel 48: Housing was a serious problem.

picture exists on public domain

Racial tensions in the North were expressed through the Jim Crow laws. According to “separate but equal” doctrine, African Americans had to occupy only colored spaces in the city. Josef Alberts, the artist and educator who invited Jacob Lawrence to teach in the Black Mountain College in 1946, arranged a private train car for Lawrence and his wife Gwendolyn Knight, when they passed Mason-Dixon Line. Josef Alberts knew that the couple would be transferred to Jim Crow cars and wanted to avoid the humiliating act.

Panel 49: They found discrimination in the North. It was a different kind.

picture exists on public domain

Jacob Lawrence died in Seattle in 2000. His work captures the struggle and the beauty of the Great Depression, since he represents the way African Americans escaped from lynchings to riots, having as the backdrop the american urban space, that is Harlem.

Jacob Lawrence. Self-Portrait. 1977. Gouache and tempera on paper, 22 1/8 × 30” (56.2 × 76.2 cm). National Academy of Design, New York. © 2015 Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

picture exists on public domain

Selected online sources and bibliography

Bearden, Romare, et al. “The Black Artist in America: A Symposium.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, vol. 27, no. 5, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1969, pp. 245–61, https://doi.org/10.2307/3258415.

Grant, Nathan. “Image and Text in Jacob Lawrence.” Black American Literature Forum, vol. 23, no. 3, St. Louis University, 1989, pp. 523–37, https://doi.org/10.2307/2904203.

Sheehan, Tanya. “Confronting Taboo: Photography and the Art of Jacob Lawrence.” American Art, vol. 28, no. 3, The University of Chicago Press, 2014, pp. 28–51, https://doi.org/10.1086/679707.

Wheat, Ellen Harkins. “Jacob Lawrence and the Legacy of Harlem.” Archives of American Art Journal, vol. 30, no. 1/4, University of Chicago Press, 1990, pp. 119–26, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1557650.