The American Struggle
A national exhibition tour celebrating Jacob Lawrence’s Struggle series begins at the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson wrote the acclaimed book The Warmth of Other Suns:the Epic Story of America’s Great Migration in 2010. She wrote, “Well, I’m a daughter of the great migration as, really, the majority of African Americans that you meet in the north and west are products of the great migration. It’s that massive. Many of us owe our very existence to the fact that people migrated.”
From 1915 to 1970, during the
Great Migration, 6 million Southern black people moved from the agricultural south to the industrial centers of the northeast, Midwest and west, seeking a better and a safer life. Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where his parents had moved during the Great Migration.the family later moved to Pennsylvania.after his parents separated, his mother moved to Harlem to look for work. He and his brother and sister were put in foster care until she could take them to Harlem three years later, when he was 13. His mother enrolled him in the Harlem Art Workshop at the 135th Street branch of the Newyork Public Library, and he began painting genre paintings of Harlem life.“harlem was a mecca,” he recalls.“there was a sense of life, a sense of living.”
In 1937, Lawrence turned to scenes of black history, doing research at the 135th Street branch of the library which is now The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. His first series of 16 paintings dealt with Toussaint L’ouverture, who led the Haitian revolution that resulted in the
establishment of the first independent black republic. It was followed the next year by 32 paintings on the social reformer and statesman Frederick Douglass. In 1940 he completed 31 paintings on Harriet Tubman the famed abolitionist and supporter of women’s suffrage. Lawrence wrote,
“We hear about Molly Pitcher.we hear about Betsy Ross.the Negro woman has never been included in American histories.”
That same year he began his most famous series on The Great Migration, working on all 60 panels at once.the Museum of Modern Art in Newyork began a 15-venue tour of the series in 1944.
In 1954 he began a 30-panel series, Struggle: From the History of the American People, which was acquired by a collector and sold piecemeal over the years during which five panels were lost. Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, has reassembled the extant paintings along with reproductions of the lost paintings and those too fragile to travel for their
first museum exhibition and their first showing in more than 60 years.the exhibition, Jacob Lawrence: the American Struggle, runs through April 26 before going on a national tour.at the time of their painting Lawrence said, “the paintings which I propose to do will depict the struggles of a people to create a nation and their attempt to build a democracy.”
The museum notes, “the paintings reflect Lawrence’s desire ‘to express the universal beauty of man’s continuous struggle’ and his visual style conveys the physical, emotional, and ideological struggles inherent to the country’s founding. Lawrence saw American history as a complex shared experience and his paintings sought to create a broader, more encompassing narrative that celebrated prominent historical
figures alongside those unsung and underrepresented. Jacob Lawrence:the American Struggle presents
Lawrence’s paintings in dialogue with contemporary artists Derrick Adams, Bethany Collins and Hank
Willis Thomas whose work powerfully asserts that America’s struggles—for democracy, justice, truth and inclusion—continue in earnest today.”
The panel And a Woman Mans a Cannon depicts Margaret Cochran Corbin at the Battle of Fort Washington in 1776. She had become a cannon operator and took over for her husband’s operator when he was killed in battle and carried on the task alone. Lawrence paints her blending into the battle, her dress and the field painted the same color.
The title of one colorful painting quotes from Thomas Jefferson’s letter to Merriweather Lewis: In all your intercourse with the natives, treat them in the most friendly and conciliatory manner which their own conduct will admit…—jefferson to Lewis & Clark, 1803.