In 1941, at age 23, Jacob Lawrence created a powerful statement that continues to ripple through American visual history with The Migration Series. Lawrence’s 60 panels on the epic movement of black Americans—known as the Great Migration—were painted on modest cardboard with text captions. “I wanted to create a work that was very sparse,” he said. “You’d see it immediately.” The work was first shown by pioneering gallerist Edith Halpert, whose Downtown Gallery focused on social realism. “If it was a portrait, it was a portrait of myself, a portrait of my family, a portrait of my peers,” said Lawrence, who went on to a long career teaching and making art, including a stint teaching at the famed Black Mountain College in North Carolina.
