He Colored the Shapes of Struggle
by Frederick B. Hudson
The small boy crawled around the floor of his new apartment in Harlem.
Newly arrived from Philadelphia he felt alienated in a neighborhood with few
lots to pay in. His sensitive eyes caught and captured the designs of the
rugs, curtains, and dollies that furnished their small home.
 Years later when he got one of his first jobs-delivering clothes for a
cleaners, his sensitivity absorbed the hard-fought battle for dignity that
the pressers in the cleaners waged to finish their work. His artistic eye
remembered the distinctive patterns found in the home furnishings of his
youth and recreated them in the clothes on the ironing boards.
These two distinct perceptions forged the palette that produced Jacob
Lawrence's monumental works that chronicled human dignity and pain in
paints. The Ironers grew from Lawrence's challenged boyhood, but the
paintings he produced from 1930 until his death in 2000 combined formal
training with a brutal awareness of life's hostile images captured in
rectangles for ages.
Due his years of productivity he often produced series of
paintings-taking care to compose all the various painting simultaneously,
mixing the colors that would be used in all the paintings after drawing the
images of all the compositiions-thus insuring that all the reds, greens,
browns, etc. would be the same in the series.
This careful planning of compositional themes has resulting the largest
exhibition of his paintings to date. Entitled Over the Line and currently on
exhibit at the Whitney Museum in New York City until February 3, 2002 and
then traveling to The Detroit Institute of Fine Arts, the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.
 The exhibit pulses with a throbbing humanism that could never be contained
in one painting-the human struggle transcends from canvas to canvas, from
frame to frame to embody one man's attempt to render sorrow and sacrifice,
victory and victims with equal emphasis.
Raised in economically deprived circumstances in the 1930's Lawrence was
encouraged to paint in an after school program on 130th Street in Harlem
called Utopia Children's House-during the same years he was entranced by the
politically charged speeches of Adam Clayton Powell Jr. at Abyssinian Baptist
Church.. A prize he won at Abyssinian Sunday School in 1933 set the theme
through his career of chronically the travels of pilgrims and prophets-he
depicted the travels of the apostle Peter.
Although forced to drop out of high school he continued to study at the
WPA Harlem Art Workshop and later at the American Artists School. His meager
economic resources forced him to adapt a technique similar to poster painting
in which he purchased jars of the three primary colors-red, blue, and
yellow-mixing them in various components to make other shades. He drew his
figures first with pencil, then colored them in-similar to techniques used by
comic strip artists. In 1939 and 1940 he completed his first narrative
series-The Life of Frederick Douglass followed by The Life of Harriet
Tubman-both of these were given to a foundation as collateral for loans. Both
of these narrative series were exhibited at the Library of Congress in 1940
in commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the Thirteenth Amendment.
These early successes were followed by the creation of perhaps his best
known narrative series The Migration of the Negro. Fortune, the magazine of
the wealthy class saw fit to publish 26 panels of this work in 1941.
 Professor Henry Louis Gates of Harvard has written that "Lawrence's
'Migration Series' is an attempt to resolve two central competing modes of
representation in the African American tradition that clashed and struggled
for dominance in the 1920's and 1930's: a naturalism that sought to reveal
how individual "choice" was always shaped and curtailed by environmental
forces and a modernism that sought to chart the relation of the individual
will to the chaotic environment. "
Beginning and ending in train stations, the series shows throngs of Southern
migrants escaping their limited options only to be confronted with new
racism. Using simple colors and movement, each panel contains words that tell
of different dimensions of adjustment and adaptation "down North."
Many constructive years and honors followed for the man who began by
studying the rug patterns of his simple Harlem apartment; his humanism was so
broad in its reach and compassion he was asked to illustrate the suffering of
the Japanese atomic bomb victims for John Hersey's novel Hiroshima.
Until his death in 2000, he was constantly reaching for the light of
human toil, reflected by his vision as both griot-storyteller-and
vigilante-lighter of lanterns to expose injustice's brutal weapons and
wounds. Words from a panel of The Life of Harriet Tubman could well describe
Lawrence's own forays 'over the line: "And in the visions of the night she
saw the horsemen coming. Beckoning hands were ever motioning her to come, and
she seemed to see a line dividing the land of slavery from the land of freedom.
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