Jacob Lawrence Art Prints

Jacob Lawrence was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey. At thirteen, he moved to Harlem in New York City, where he participated in a number of community art programs and obtained a two-year scholarship to the American Artists School. By his late teens, Lawrence was already producing art with the political and cultural themes that would resonate throughout his career: his earliest surviving works depict Harlem residents struggling with poverty, inadequate health care and racism. In 1941, at the age of twenty-four, Lawrence completed a series of sixty paintings called the Migration of the Negro. Depicting the migration of millions of African-Americans from the rural South to Northern cities, this remarkable series brought him to the attention of the art world and launched his career. Soon Lawrence was exhibiting frequently in museums and galleries, the first African-American to receive sustained recognition from the American cultural mainstream. Lawrence was a tenured professor at the University of Washington in Seattle from 1971 until his retirement in 1986. His work is included in almost 200 museum collections and has been the subject of four major retrospectives. Lawrence was the recipient of numerous honors, including the Presidential Medal of Arts and at least eighteen honorary doctorates.