Jacob Lawrence

Jacob Lawrence 1917-2000, American painter, b. Atlantic City, N.J. In Lawrence's work social themes, often detailing the African-American experience, are expressed in colorfully angular, simplified, expressive, and richly decorative figurative effects. He executed many cycles of paintings, often narrative, including Harriet Tubman (1939-40), Migration (completed 1941, Museum of Modern Art and Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.), Coast Guard (1943-45), and Builders series, on which he worked for parts of the last 50 years of his life. His War series and Tombstones are in the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City. Also known for the vivid prints he began producing in 1963 and his monumental mosaic mural (designed 1997, installed 2001) for the New York subway system, Lawrence taught at Black Mountain College, the Univ. of Washington School of Art, several other colleges, and a number of major New York City art schools. In 1941 he married Gwendolyn Knight, 1913-2005, an American painter and sculptor, b. Bridgetown, Barbados.

Bibliography: See P. T. Nesbett and M. DuBois, The Complete Jacob Lawrence (2000); P. T. Nesbett, Jacob Lawrence: The Complete Prints (1963-2000) (2001); biography by E. H. Wheat (1986, repr. 1990).

Lawrence, Jacob (1917–2000) American painter, one of the first black Americans to win recognition in the white art world. He was born in Atlantic City and studied at the Harlem Art Workshop and other schools in New York in the 1930s. His work was concerned with black culture, both historical and contemporary. In 1936, for example, he began a series on the life of Toussaint L'Ouverture, the former slave who founded the republic of Haiti, and in 1940–1 he did a series of 60 paintings on ‘The Migration of the Negro’ (examples are in MOMA, New York); contemporary subjects include life in Harlem and desegregation in the South during the 1960s. His later work tended to be more decorative and less concerned with social comment, but all his work is characterized by the stylization of his figures into strong, angular, flattened forms, reminiscent of those of Ben Shahn. Lawrence taught at various colleges, including the University of Washington in Seattle, where he settled in 1972.