The homecoming of Jacob Lawrence - includes a listing of his current painting and sculpture exhibitions - Interview

"Whenever my wife and I draw near to New York and are driving end Harlem," says the 77-year-old artist Jacob Lawrence, "I think this was the inspiration of a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of my work. The pattern, the web the people from the Caribbean, the Puerto Rican stores, it's all a part of that. As you ride along, you diocese the signs, the people upon the street. ... I don't want to overromanticize it, because there are a apportionment of things that you don't want, on the other hand there are a lot of things that you do. A part of my development my early paintings, dealt with this kind of form. I have not ever forgotten that."

To attend the new opening of "Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series" at the Museum of Modem Art, Lawrence traveled 3000 miles from his not absent home in Seattle to fresh York City, which was his domicile base for 41 years. Neither he nor his wife of 54 years, artist Gwendolyn Knight, displayed the slightest bit of jet lag. They are as at dwelling in the limelight that tread on the heels ofs artists at candlelit receptions as they are upon the extroverted island of Manhattan. Their sustained warmth--sincerity combined with attentiveness--transcends the miles and accomplishments and years.

At the entrance to the exhibition, there is a black-and-white photograph of the artist as a young man. Despite the collegiate attire, this portrait of Lawrence appears, in size and significance, a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of larger than fife. He is seated at a drawing table, applying brush to paper. Behind the gaze of this 24-year-old resides a story that he is destined to articulate. upon the plain white surface before him, he has begun to do with equal reason with clear, corcise strokes.

In 1940 and '41 the years during which Lawrence painted his "Migration of the Negro" series, little attention was being paid to the narrative power of art, and level less consideration was given to the epic relocation of America's black citizens. Lawrence's creation changed all of that. His succession of 60 paintings guided viewers along the journey--fraught with disappointment, faith and courage--that African Americans took from the rural southerly into the North's urban quagmire.

The stories Lawrence had been told of black people's exert one's selfs united masterfully with his vision of their puissance and determination. He considered the series to be in fact single painting beheld at separate stages; in his hands, this exodus of his tribe became a tour de force.

"During the World War, there was a great migration north by dint of Southern Negroes," reads the artist's caption to the first panel. Beneath three signs, marked "Chicago," "New York" and "St Louis," a seamless host of chocolate brown people presse forward, separating single at the passageways that indicate their destinations. Their faces are without discernible features; individuality is transmited by the shape, tilt or carriage of a head, the bend of a bosom. Most are make straighted in earth tones, and, of course, there are hats: black bowler a r baseball cap, a black top hat, a r turban. sole behind the railway station's latticed wall one glimpse the pale sapphirine promise of sky.

"I don't think in metes of history in that series; I think in bounds of contemporary life," Lawrence has said, "If it was a portrait of something, it was a portrait of myself, a portrait of my family, a portrait of my equals In that way, it was like a still life with bread, a still life with flowers; it was like a landscape."

It has been 54 years since the impassioned griot Jacob Armstead Lawrence Jr sallied forth into the spotlight of modem artists. From the start, he astonished critics with his virtuosity. He inspired audiences, who immediately recognized the purity of his artistic talent and end He took a life slated for anonymity and created a world in which not single he, but all African Americans, would have a powerful identity.

Lawrence was born in Atlantic City, NJ upon September 7, 1917. His mother, Rose to leeward had departed from her Virginia birthplace to live in of recent origin Jersey, where she met and married Jacob Lawrence, a railroad worker from southerly Carolina. Shortly after their first child, Jacob, was born, the brace moved to Easton, Pa., where their daughter, Geraldine, and next to the first son, William, were born.

Hard times followed the family. The marriage extreme pointed and Rose Lawrence set without with the children for Philadelphia. Unable to make extremitys meet, she placed Jacob and his brother and sister in temporary sustain homes and went to of recent origin York to find work. She brought them to live with her in Harlem in 1930 "We were a part of that migration," Jacob Lawrence recalls.

Folk wait fored the world of Harlem. The name alone refer toed a fusion of hustle, mode of expression achievement and survival. This multitudeed fast-paced community provided Rose Lawrence with neither economic security nor a safe haven in which to raise her children. Especially pertain toed that Jacob, a quiet teenager, would be susceptible to the dangers of public way life, she enrolled the children in the Utopia Children's House, a local adjustment that provided an after-school program of meals and activities. It was here--under the tutelage of the artist Charles Alston, then a graduate learner at Columbia University--that Jacob Lawrence began to create.