The Art Show is a collection of artwork by AWMS students in the style of Jacob Lawrence.
Info about Jacob Lawrence:
The most widely acclaimed African American artist of this century, and one of only several whose works are included in standard survey books on American art, Jacob Lawrence has enjoyed a successful career for more than fifty years. Lawrence’s paintings portray the lives and struggles of African Americans, and have found wide audiences due to their abstract, colorful style and universality of subject matter. By the time he was thirty years old, Lawrence had been labeled as the ?“foremost Negro artist,” and since that time his career has been a series of extraordinary accomplishments. Moreover, Lawrence is one of the few painters of his generation who grew up in a black community, was taught primarily by black artists, and was influenced by black people.
Lawrence was born on September 7, 1917,* in Atlantic City, New Jersey. He was the eldest child of Jacob and Rosa Lee Lawrence. The senior Lawrence worked as a railroad cook and in 1919 moved his family to Easton, Pennsylvania, where he sought work as a coal miner. Lawrence’s parents separated when he was seven, and in 1924 his mother moved her children first to Philadelphia and then to Harlem when Jacob was twelve years old. He enrolled in Public School 89 located at 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, and at the Utopia Children’s Center, a settlement house that provided an after school program in arts and crafts for Harlem children. The center was operated at that time by painter Charles Alston who immediately recognized young Lawrence’s talents.
Jacob Lawrence grew up in Harlem in the 1930s, where, despite the Depression, he found a ?“real vitality” among the black artists, poets, and writers in the community. He studied at the Harlem Art Workshop and joined the ?“306” studio, where he met his future wife, Gwendolyn Knight. Lawrence never completed high school but taught himself African American history, spending hours in the library researching legendary black figures and events to use in his paintings. He worked for the Works Progress Administration in the late 1930s and in 1941 was the first African American artist to be represented by a New York gallery. Lawrence created several series of paintings that documented the stories of heroes such as Harriet Tubman and John Brown. He considered his work to be celebratory and said once that his images ?“just deal with the social scene … They’re how I feel about things.” (Wheat, Jacob Lawrence, American Painter, 1986)
