Lawrence's 'Migration' settles in D.C. museum

Art of blacks' journey north on display at Phillips

By Karen Houppert | Special to The Sun

May 7, 2008

In 1941, 23-year-old Harlem-based artist Jacob Lawrence completed a haunting series of paintings depicting the mass migration of African-Americans that occurred between the two world wars when almost 1 million moved from the rural South to the industrial North. Called The Migration Series, the entire work is on display at Washington's Phillips Collection through Oct. 26.

The project was hugely ambitious for a young painter. It consists of 60 separate tempera paintings, each of which is captioned to form a corresponding historically accurate narrative. To create the work, the artist received a small fellowship from a philanthropic fund that allowed him to rent a studio in New York City, where he had enough space to lay out the 60 panels.

After mining the New York City library's Division of Negro History, Literature and Prints in Harlem for its limited references to the migrant diaspora, Lawrence created a kind of script for the project. He drew upon his own family's story, as well as the tales he heard from neighbors, friends and relatives who made this often-grueling trip. Ultimately, these migrants would help swell the population of New York City by 66 percent and Detroit by 600 percent - in less than two decades.

To create the series, he spread out his 12-inch-by-18-inch panels and began to paint all 60 at once, layering on colors from darkest to lightest, being attentive to patterns and a limited palette that pulled the entire work together.

A year after Lawrence completed the project, the pictures were published in Fortune magazine, and he had a solo show in New York's Downtown Gallery, making him the first African-American to be represented by a major commercial gallery in the city. He was instantly famous, and New Yorkers clamored to see more of his work.

The gallery owner, however, worried that the $2,000 price for the series was too exorbitant to ask of a single buyer; she split the series in half. Today, the Museum of Modern Art in New York owns the even-numbered panels, while the Phillips Collection owns the odd-numbered paintings. This new exhibit at the Phillips Collection reunites all the works in series, providing museum-goers with a rare chance to view it the way Lawrence always intended.

"The themes of struggle, searching for a better life, the trials and tribulations migrants face, the hope they carry - that is what Lawrence was interested in," says Phillips Collection associate curator Elsa Smithgall, noting that today's headlines continue to chronicle immigrants' plight and make this a show that will continue to resonate thematically.

With that in mind, the museum has created a kiosk at the end of the exhibit where visitors can add their stories. "This way, their voice will become a part of this wonderful, threaded tapestry of American migration," Smithgall says.

Above and beyond the story Migration tells, the paintings stand on their own merit. They also have their own melting-pot narrative about the swirl of artistic influences Lawrence drew on to create his uniquely compelling images. One painting of New York City rowhouses is flattened into a grid of windows that nods to abstract artist Piet Mondrian with its rectangles of red, yellow and black.

A panel of a washerwoman alludes to the muscular anonymity of workers favored by Works Progress Administration muralists. An empty Southern cabin echoes the bleakness of Walker Evans' photos. And in the painting captioned "Food had doubled in price because of the war," a child who stares hungrily at the table bears Picasso's vertical eyes, while his mother, who appears to be carving a slice of bacon, hunkers down to her work with the same deeply slanted shoulders that distinguish Picasso's 1904 Woman Ironing.

Lawrence's seemingly simple images of anonymous folk belie a complexity of pattern, perspective and gesture that is both fleetingly familiar and powerfully disorienting.

Lawrence, who was educated by mentor Charles Alston in an after-school arts program he attended starting at age 13, would have been exposed to a wide range of artists - as well as influenced by major figures in the Harlem Renaissance. He met Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes and Alain LeRoy Locke, among others. And because he entered the art world through the sheer luck of an after-school program, throughout his life Lawrence remained deeply committed to encouraging young artists.

Bearing this legacy in mind, the Phillips Collection created a multidisciplinary curriculum surrounding The Migration Series and worked with educators and kids nationally as it toured a portion of Lawrence's work last year.

Using The Migration Series as a launching pad to explore the history of the migration period, to serve as a conversation-starter for discussion of race in America, and to elicit narrative paintings of contemporary migrations, the curriculum has spawned some terrific children's art.

As an accompaniment to the series, the museum features an entire floor of this work. Parsing these youngsters' responses to migration is a perfect cap to the museum outing, leaving this viewer with a renewed commitment to the value of arts education and confident that there is a next-generation Jacob Lawrence out there just waiting for a box of tempera and a little direction.