Jacob Lawrence

Jacob Armstead Lawrence was an American painter who lived from 1917 to 2000, known for his portrayal of African American historical subjects and contemporary life. He referred to his own style as dynamic cubism, an art form popularized in Europe that drew great inspiration from West African and Meso-American art, found inspiration for his compositions in everyday life in Harlem, and brought the African American experience to life using blacks and browns juxtaposed with vivid colors. He also taught, spending sixteen years as a professor at the University of Washington. Among the best known twentieth-century African American painters, he is known for modernist portrayals of everyday life as well as narratives of African American history and historical figures. At age twenty-three he gained national recognition with his sixty-panel Migration Series, depicting the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North, which was purchased jointly by the Phillips Collection in Washington DC and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His works are in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Reynolda House Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Northwest Art, and his 1947 painting The Builders hangs in the White House. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/