Mr.Caldwell
Jacob Lawrence -The Migration Series
Composed of sixty paintings, the Migration Series put, what I like to call Black Art, on the map. This series of paintings showed the migration of African Americans from the south to the north between the two World Wars. Though these paintings didn't show much facial expression or emotion, we can still get the feel of poverty and an unhappy lower class race. I think that leaving these facial expressions out makes us really look deeper into the painting, and it is a great way to draw the observers attention. The migration series is done with water color, laying one coat of color down at a time which gave Lawrence a consistency of colors. These paintings were put in a New York gallery in 1941, making Jacob Lawrence the first black artist to have work placed in a New York gallery. Until this series, the migration of the southern African American culture was not publicized or brought to the attention of the middle and social class people. No one really knew the struggle and the hard times they had experienced except themselves, but Jacob made it known by placing it in one of the biggest art-intelligent cities, New York.