BLACK PAINTERS MATTER, and especially so at the Phillips Collection art museum in Washington D.C. On permanent display there are 30 of the famous “The Migration of the Negro” series of 60 paintings, produced in 1940 by the noted black artist Jacob Lawrence. The series, in fact, gives the museum a significant hallmark.
In the past few decades, curators have been mindful of updating collections with more works by minority artists. And in the age of Black Lives Matter ferment, a new microscope is probably going to be put on the topic and raise protests, whether legitimate or not.
In that sense, the Phillips Collection and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York—which owns the other 30 of the Lawrence series—are in good stead. So perhaps is the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, which in 2016 launched a nationwide traveling exhibit of black artists from the 1920s onward (100 works and 45 representative artists).
For unique reasons, perhaps, Jacob Lawrence has stood apart. He had a long and celebrated career, experimenting with many styles on black themes. He died in 2000 after his years as art professor at the University of Washington in Seattle.
His Migration Series, however—a pictorial narrative on the migration of southern blacks to northern cities from 1910-1930—is by far his most famous work. And as a young artist, Lawrence was lucky indeed. The series struck a chord in popular culture. In 1941, Fortune magazine published 26 of the panels. Eventually the series was pursued by two important museums.
The series has been long-lived in other ways. For example, in recent years Amtrak has replicated train station scenes from the series on large movable exhibit panels for display at nationwide stations. During the Great Migration, hundreds of thousands of southern blacks took the railroads’ most convenient direct lines to Chicago, explaining the origin of jazz and the blues in that city and in Detroit.
Lawrence’s parents had left South Carolina for New York City, where he was born in 1917. There, the migration fueled the “New Black Movement,” soon to be called the Harlem Renaissance. While attending public schools, Lawrence also matriculated at the Harlem Art Workshop and heard lectures on black culture and art at the 135th Street Public Library. In particular, he would be inspired by the tempera paintings of the Italian Renaissance.
He first applied this inspiration to a series of paintings about the lives of black pioneers such Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. Then came the migration series idea. Working in a modernist style, he used the same solid colors across all the small paper panels, composing with angular forms and contrasts of dark and light.
With his overall narrative in mind, Lawrence numbered his paintings 1 to 60, each with a caption. As the series gained fame, he renamed the series “The Great Migration” and adjusted his original titles. He wrote in 1992 that the series showed “what human beings can endure and survive.”
Panel 1 is perhaps the best known. Lawrence shows a crowded train station with the gates named “Chicago,” “New York,” and “St. Louis.” Panel 23 says, “The Migration Spread.” Panel 39 illustrates that, “Railroad platforms were piled high with luggage.” Lawrence painted how the men went first and sent money home to bring wives and children.
The panels go on to describe life in the Northern cities. His narrative shows opportunities, but also discrimination of “a different kind.”
Given the 1940s rage for abstract painting, Lawrence went against the grain by using narrative illustration—a pattern seen in much black painting thereafter (telling the stories of black life). For the history of curation of black art, Lawrence was fortunate indeed.
During the summer of 2020, the debate over control of the African American art narrative reached a fever pitch. At the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, well-known curator Gary Garrels gave a presentation on the museum’s latest acquisitions from black artists. He added as an aside, “Don’t worry, we will definitely still continue to collect white artists.”
When a follow-up question (it was all on Zoom) challenged that comment, he further explained that the museum wanted to avoid “reverse discrimination” against non-black artists. That’s when things snowballed: online protest, a public petition to have him fired, and outspoken opprobrium from black activists. A day or so later a contrite Garrels resigned after 20 years as curator.
If Lawrence were alive to hear the story, he would surely feel that he was the very fortunate artists who enjoyed a lifelong avoidance of such contemporary culture wars.