Black Excellence Month: Jacob Lawrence

Jacob Lawrence
(1917-2000)

Jacob Lawrence began his painting career during the Harlem Renaissance. Not only is he an internationally recognized artist, but he was an educator as well. He attended school at P.S. 68 (Public School #68) in the Bronx, New York, and Frederick Douglass Junior High School in Brooklyn, New York. He received his first artistic training by Charles Alston at the Utopia Children’s House after school, the Harlem Art Workshop.

Lawrence also was involved with the Harlem Mural Project for the Works Progress Administration (WPA). He worked with Augusta Savage in the Uptown Arts Laboratory in 1936, which became the Harlem Community Art Center in 1937. By the time Lawrence was 24, he had produced over 170 paintings.

One of his most prominent projects was a series of forty-one 11-inch by 19-inch paintings called Toussaint L’Ouverture (1938), inspired by the Haitian Revolution of 1795. The work was presented in Lawrence’s first national exhibition, a show at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1939. Some of his other important works are The Life of Fredrick Douglass (1939), The Life of Harriet Tubman (1940), and The Life of John Brown (1941).

From 1943 to 1945, Lawrence served in the United States Coast Guard. He later began teaching at the Black Mountain College in 1946. He won many awards in his lifetime, two of which being the National Medal of the Arts and the Spingarn Medal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).