Slide 1
Lawrence told the Great Migration through sixty panels
Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series tells a broad history through sixty painted panels. It addresses African Americans moving from the South towards northern cities.
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The sequence makes room for reasons to leave, the journey and experiences after arrival. No single panel has to carry the entire historical account by itself.
Slide 2
Working colour by colour connected the scenes
Lawrence worked across the panels colour by colour. This helped give the series a consistent visual character despite its many different scenes.
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The process differs from finishing one painting before beginning another. Treating the group as a unit made production itself part of the series' coherence.
Slide 3
Captions and images supplied different parts of the story
Each panel is accompanied by a caption. The text can identify a condition or event that the simplified image expresses through forms and gestures.
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A caption need not repeat every visible detail. It can place a scene within the larger historical movement, allowing a small composition to address a broad social experience.
Slide 4
The 1941 paintings and later revised captions have different histories
Lawrence completed the series in 1941 and later revised its captions. The paintings and their accompanying words therefore have related but different histories.
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MoMA presents both the original texts and the revised 1993 version. Comparing them lets viewers study a later reconsideration without pretending the words remained unchanged.
Slide 5
The complete series is divided between two collections
The Migration Series is divided between the Phillips Collection and MoMA. Its complete sequence is not always physically displayed together.
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Digital presentations make all sixty panels available for comparison. They help recover the series as a whole while differing from the scale and material encounter of the painted objects.
Sources
- The Migration Series panel 23
The Phillips Collection
- Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series
Museum of Modern Art