Privately Owned, Publicly Shared

1910s

1917

  • September 7: Jacob Armstead Lawrence born in Atlantic City, New Jersey to Jacob and Rosa Lee Lawrence.

1919

  • Family moves to Easton, Pennsylvania, where daughter, Geraldine, is born.

1920s

1924

  • Parents separate. Rosa Lee Lawrence moves the children to Philadelphia where another son, William, is born.

1927

  • Rosa Lee Lawrence moves to New York City. Jacob and his siblings remain in foster homes in Philadelphia until 1930.

1930s

1930

  • Rosa Lee Lawrence moves family to Harlem, where they live in an apartment at 142 West 143rd Street.  Lawrence attended grammar school at P.S. 68 and Frederick Douglass Junior High (P.S. 139).  After school hours, attends day-care program at Utopia Children’s House at 170 West 130th Street, where he studies arts and crafts with Charles Alston.  Paints nonfigurative geometric designs and makes papier-mâché masks and three-dimensional stage-like tableaux in small boxes.

1931

  • Attends church services and Sunday school at Abyssinian Baptist Church, where he hears Adam Clayton Powell, Jr`., deliver sermons (early 1930s).

1932

  • Attends the High School of Commerce (until 1934) while continuing to study with Charles Alston, this time at the WPA Harlem Art Workshop, in the New York Public Library’s 135th Street branch.  The classes are sponsored by the College Art Association.

1933

  • Wins prize in Sunday school at the Abyssinian Baptist Church for drawing map illustrating the travels of the apostle Peter.

1934

  • Continues to study with Charles Alston and Henry Bannarn at the WPA Harlem Art Workshop, relocated to 306 West 141st Street (a.k.a. Alston-Bannarn Studios or Studio 306).  Rents space in corner of Alston’s Studio until 1940.
  • Drops out of school when his mother loses her job.  Holds several part-time jobs including delivering newspapers and liquor and working for a printing shop.

1935

  • Meets “Professor” Charles Seifert, a lecturer and historian who has a large library of African and African American literature.  Seifert offers Lawrence use of his library and encourages him to make use of Arthur Schomburg’s collection at the New York Public Library.  Participates in bus trip organized by Seifert to museum exhibitions, including African Negro Art at the Museum of Modern Art.
  • Begins painting scenes of life in Harlem, using commercial tempera (poster) paints on lightweight brown paper.  Several early paintings depict his immediate environment, including his studio and life at home with his family.  Other early works offer a biting satirical view of life in Harlem, highlighting poverty, crime, racial tensions, and police brutality.

1936

  • Works for six months in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) near Middletown, New York; makes drawing of life in the CCC.
  • Watches Charles Alston paint WPA mural Magic and Medicine, which is installed in 1937 at the Harlem Hospital.
  • Sees W.E.B. DuBois’s play Haiti at the Lafayette Theater.  Begins research on Haiti in Division of Negro History, Literature, and Prints at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library in preparation for his first series – The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture. The series is completed in 1938 and consists of 41 paintings depicting L’Ouverture’s role in establishing the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere.

1938

  • Begins research for a series of paintings on the life of Frederick Douglass, the Maryland slave turned abolitionist, speaker and writer.
  • September:  With the assistance of Augusta Savage, a sculptor and teacher at the Harlem Art Workshop whom Lawrence met earlier at the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts, is hired by the WPA/FAP easel division.  Employed for 18 months, submitting to the division two paintings every six weeks.
  • Continues to paint genre scenes of life in Harlem.  Makes frequent visits to museum and modern art galleries.

1939

  • Completes series of 32 panels entitled The Life of Frederick Douglass, which he gives to Harmon Foundation as collateral against a loan of approximately $100.
  • Begins research for a series on Harriet Tubman, the former slave who became an abolitionist and important figure in the Underground Railroad.

1940s

1943

  • Inducted into U.S. Coast Guard as steward’s mate; attends boot camp at Curtis Bay, Maryland. Stationed with an African American contingent at Ponce Training Station, St. Augustine, Florida, where he works as a steward at the officers’ training camp and lives in an apartment above his commanding officer’s garage. Writes to his dealer, Edith Halpert, of the horrible conditions for blacks in the South and notes that he plans to complete a group of drawings entitled How the Negro Views the South, which he hopes she can arrange to have published.

1944

  • Assigned to USS Sea Cloud, Boston, a weather patrol boat and the first racially integrated ship in U.S. naval history. The ship is commanded by Captain Carlton Skinner who promotes Lawrence to petty officer, 3rd Class, with public relations status that allows him to paint Coast Guard life full-time. Chooses atypical subjects for a combat artist, depicting scenes of daily life, rather than portraits of the officers, the ship, or images of war. When the USS Sea Cloud is decommissioned, Lawrence is reassigned to the USS General Wilds P. Richardson, a troop transport ship stationed in Boston that travels to England, Italy, Spain, Gibraltar, Port Said (Egypt), and Karachi (in present-day Pakistan). Completes sketches of his travels in spiralbound notebook.

1945

  • Decides to paint series depicting experience of war. Applies for a John Simon Guggenheim Post Service fellowship. Alfred Barr, Francis Henry Taylor (director, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), and Robert Tyler Davis (director, Portland Museum of Art, Oregon) write letters of recommendation. Receives fellowship notification of award in October while still in the service.
  • Included in annuals at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, and the City Art Museum, St. Louis. Included in biennials at the Brooklyn Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
  • Discharged from U.S. Coast Guard and returns to Brooklyn, where he begins paintings of laborers: shoeshine boys, domestic servants, seamstresses, and carpenters.
  • The Life of John Brown (1941) is exhibited for the first time at the Downtown Gallery and begins a 15-venue United States tour, sponsored by the American Federation of Arts. The series receives positive reviews in the mainstream art press. Art Digest notes that Lawrence “has made of this saga a powerful and compelling series. Simplified in approach, and, in several instances, highly abstract, they are never obscure in their import and their message is amplified through the technique employed.”

1946

  • Begins work on the War series, painting the panels individually and signing them as they are completed rather than working on them simultaneously as he did with his earlier series.

1948

  • Exhibits for first time at the Venice Biennale.
  • Commissioned to create illustrations for Langston Hughes’s One-Way Ticket, a collection of poems. Executes brush and ink drawings that differ significantly from earlier drawings in an attempt to find a style more compatible with printing technologies. Six drawings are included in the publication.
  • Completes commissions for New Republic and Masses and Mainstream (also 1949).Included in annuals at the Brooklyn Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago (wins Norman Wait Harris medal), the Carnegie Institute, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, the Butler Institute of American Art, the University of Iowa, the University of Nebraska, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

1949

  • Conceives of idea of painting series on “a history of the Negro people in the United States.” Begins project five years later (1954) as Struggle… From the History of the American People.
  • Voluntarily enters Hillside Hospital, Queens, New York, for treatment of depression. Edith Halpert contributes to his medical expenses, helps Knight Lawrence find employment, and provides Lawrence with art supplies, which he uses to paint images of life in the hospital. He remains at Hillside Hospital for four months, leaving on November 12.

1950s

1950

  • New York Times Magazine includes feature article on Lawrence’s stay at Hillside Hospital–”An Artist Reports on the Troubled Mind.” Exhibition of hospital paintings opens at the Downtown Gallery one week later to positive reviews in mainstream art press. A reviewer for Art Digest comments that “clearly nothing can destroy this artist’s objectively discerning eye.”
  • Publication of Oliver Larkin’s seminal Art and Life in America. Larkin characterizes Lawrence as a social painter and writes that to “praise Lawrence for his ingenious patterns was to belittle their meaning as the shapes of tortured and congested living, the arabesques of white brutality.”
  • Included in annuals at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

1953

  • Solo exhibition, Performance: A Series of New Paintings in Tempera by Jacob Lawrence, at the Downtown Gallery. Mainstream press is positive but less exuberant than for previous exhibitions. Art Digest notes that Lawrence has abandoned social content, addressing instead problems of “expression and technique.”

1954

  • Begins research at the Schomburg Library for a series of 60 paintings on the history of the United States. Completes five study drawings by May.
  • Applies for a Chapelbrook Foundation fellowship for $2,000 to continue work on a “pictorial history of the United States.” Jay Leyda acts as a reference. Lawrence projects that with the fellowship he will complete the series in two years.

1955

  • Begins teaching at Five Towns Music and Art Foundation, Cedarhurst, Long Island (until 1962, and again 1966—8), and at Pratt Institute, New York.
  • Invited to enter mural competition for the United Nations Building in New York. During summer, completes study for the mural, which is exhibited in the fall with the five other finalists at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Shares first prize with Stuart Davis, but the mural is never executed owing to a lack of funding.

1956

  • Completes first 30 panels of Struggle… From the History of the American People series.
  • Struggle… From the History of the American People (1954—6) exhibited at the Alan Gallery. Exhibition is favorably reviewed in Time magazine, which notes that “the fluid balance between abstraction and realist rendering is the most interesting… facet of this suite of illustrations.” Art press coverage is widespread but mostly descriptive, on several occasions comparing the works with murals of the 1930s.

1958

  • In a letter to Jay Leyda, writes: “As you probably know, things here are very exciting–the big issues at this time are whether or not to have integration in the public schools… and trying to reach the moon. Both seem to be a little time off still. I think the moon problem will be solved before the one on integration.”
  • Included in annuals at the Des Moines Art Center and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
  • Joins faculty at Pratt Institute, New York (until 1970).

1960s

1960

  • Solo retrospective opens at Brooklyn Museum and tours nationally to 16 other venues, mostly galleries and libraries at historically black colleges. Exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue containing an essay by Aline Louchheim Saarinen.
  • Saarinen characterizes Lawrence as a narrative painter and “an artistic anomaly.” She defends his work against the label of “primitive” by noting “the greater dimension of his experience and perception” but also “his conscious sensitivity to and control over his artistic means.” Critical response to the exhibition in Time magazine and the mainstream art press is overwhelmingly positive. ARTnews notes that Lawrence is “undoubtedly one of the few painters who can handle a social message and painting simultaneously.”
  • Cedric Dover’s American Negro Art is published, which refers to Lawrence as a “unique episodic painter” and describes him as a “primitive by intention.”

1961

  • Decides to travel to Africa, but visa is denied by State Department. Writes to Edith Halpert for assistance. Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence applies for U.S. passport and is denied; later able to obtain British passport because she was born in Barbados and could claim dual citizenship.
  • Begins paintings on contemporary civil rights and the themes of interracial marriage, integrated education, and nonviolent protest.

1964

  • Sells apartment in New York and returns to Nigeria with Knight Lawrence to teach and to “steep myself in Nigerian culture so that my paintings, if I’m fortunate, might show the influence of the great African artistic tradition.” They are blacklisted on their arrival in Lagos and are unable to secure housing because, as Lawrence wrote to Jay Leyda, “of my so-called background.” Aware that they are under constant surveillance by U.S. intelligence, they plan to leave Nigeria for Italy and then return to the U.S., where they promise to pursue a high-visibility lawsuit through the ACLU. They are encouraged to stay and are provided a car and driver. They remain in Lagos for a total of four months, then move to Ibadan for four months before returning to the United States. While in Nigeria, Lawrence completes paintings and drawings of African life and experiments with new painting techniques.

1965

  • Helps organize an exhibition of work by black artists residing in the United States to be shown in Dakar, Senegal. Other members of the committee include Charles Alston, Henry Geldzahler, William Lieberman, Roy Moyer, James A. Porter, Charles White, and Hale Woodruff.
  • At the invitation of Mitchell Siporin, an artist with whom Lawrence exhibited at the Downtown Gallery in the 1940s, works as artist-in-residence at Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts. Executes drawings of student protests and police brutality as well as the first known self-portraits. Also continues to paint scenes of Nigeria (through 1966). Commutes to campus from an apartment on Brattle Street in Cambridge.

1966

  • Begins teaching at the New School for Social Research, New York (until 1969)
  • Commissioned by Time magazine to paint a portrait of Stokely Carmichael.  Travels to Atlanta to meet Carmichael at SNCC headquarters shortly before Carmichael steps down as chairman.

1967

  • Teaches Life Drawing, Painting, and Composition course at the Art Students League, New York (through 1969; on leave of absence 1969—71), where former mentor Charles Alston has taught since the 1950s.
  • Creates paintings for Harriet and the Promised Land, which is published in 1968 by Windmill Books, a division of Simon & Schuster. Several paintings are not included in the final publication, including one that depicts Harriet Tubman with a gun.
  • Included in annuals at the Carnegie Institute and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

1968

  • Summer: Teaches at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine (also, in 1970).
  • Begins regularly incorporating images of builders, carpenters, and cabinetmakers into his paintings. The builders motif becomes a primary element in his work over the next 30 years. Begins dozens of pencil studies based on the woodcuts of Andreas Vesalius, a sixteenth-century Italian doctor who made elaborate drawings of cadavers.
  • Participates in symposium “The Black Artist in America” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Is referred to by moderator Romare Bearden as “America’s foremost Negro painter” but is challenged by Tom Lloyd, fellow panelist and an active participant in the black arts movement.

1969

  • The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem. The Migration of the Negro exhibited at Saint Paul’s School, Concord, New Hampshire.
  • Included in annual at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

1970s

1970

  • University of Washington offers Lawrence a full professorship, which he accepts. Pratt Institute counters by appointing him full professor, coordinator of the arts, and assistant to the dean.

1971

  • Commissioned by Edition Olympia to create a silk-screen print for the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. Creates image of five black runners with obvious references to Jesse Owens’s triumphant victory in Berlin in 1936.

1972

  • Travels to Munich Olympics as a guest of the Olympic Games Committee.Commissioned by the Washington State Capitol Museum to create “one or more paintings” based on the story of George Washington Bush, an African American pioneer who was one of the original settlers of Washington State. Proposes creating one painting and four finished drawings, but instead completes five paintings (in 1973).

1974

  • The Detroit Institute of Arts, for reasons of conservation, refuses to loan the complete John Brown Series to Lawrence’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Art.  The DIA approaches Lawrence about translating the paintings into silk-screen prints so they can accommodate requests for the series.  Works with Ives-Silman, the New Haven – based workshop associated with Josef Albers.  Project is completed in 1977.   
  • Commissioned by Lorillard Tobacco company to create a limited-edition print to be included in a bicentennial portfolio that includes works by Robert Indiana, Larry Rivers, Alex Katz, Marisol, and others. Creates silk-screen print on the subject of black suffrage.   

1975

  • Commissioned by Transworld Art to create a print for a bicentennial portfolio titled An American Portrait. Depicts a moment of confrontation between police dogs and marchers during the 1965 peace march from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery.

1976

  • Cofounds the Rainbow Art Foundation in New York with Romare Bearden, Willem de Kooning, and Bill Caldwell to assist young printmakers in the production, exhibition, and marketing of their work. Foundation supports the work of artists whose art is seldom seen by the general public, including the work of “indians, eskimos, asians, hispanics, and blacks.”
  • Included in United States Information Agency exhibition Two Hundred Years of American Painting, 1776—1976, which travels to Europe.

1977

  • Commissioned by the Presidential Inaugural Committee in Washington, D.C., to create a limited-edition print for a portfolio commemorating the inauguration of President Jimmy Carter. Rather than create a portrait of the president, he depicts an ethnically diverse crowd straining to see the event from a great distance.
  • Completes translation of The Life of John Brown to silk-screen print.

1979

  • Completes first mural commission–Games–for Kingdome Stadium in Seattle, Washington. Completes six additional murals over the next 12 years.Artist and art historian Samella Lewis, in Art: Afro-American, notes that “Lawrence represents with distinction the first generation of recognized artists nurtured by the Black experience: his community was Black, his early teachers were Black, and his first encouragement came from Blacks.… As important as the fact that Lawrence is probably the best known, most published, and most influential living Black American artist is the fact that he is a humble man of great personal stature.”Appointed commissioner of the National Council of Arts by President Jimmy Carter.
  • The Life of John Brown exhibited at the Detroit Institute of Arts.
  • Solo exhibition, Jacob Lawrence: Paintings and Graphics from 1936 to 1978, at the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia.
  • Included in Representations of America at the Pushkin Museum, Moscow.

1980s

1983

  • Retires from teaching, becoming professor emeritus at the University of Washington.

1984

  • Completes second mural for Howard University entitled Origins, 12 images pertaining to African American life and history.
  • Solo exhibition, Jacob Lawrence: Fifty Years of His Work, at the Jamaica Arts Center, New York.
  • Receives honorary doctorate from the State University of New York, and the Washington State Governor’s Award.

1985

  • Creates group of 18 colored-pencil drawings on builders theme, they were exhibited in a solo exhibition at the Francine Seders Gallery.
  • Completes mural entitled Theater for University of Washington performance hall.

1986

  • Begins working with Lou Stovall Workshop, Inc., Washington, D.C., to re-create images from The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture as silk-screen prints. Lawrence alters many of the images in the print format, heightening the drama of the original series.

1989

  • The artist and art historian Samella Lewis organizes two solo exhibitions–Jacob Lawrence: Paintings and Drawings and Jacob Lawrence: Drawings and Prints–which travel throughout the Caribbean and Africa, sponsored by the United States Information Agency.

1990s

1991

  • One of four artists commissioned by the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority to design murals for a new subway complex at Times Square. Completes initial maquette in 1996; completes final maquette in 1997.

1993

  • The Migration of the Negro exhibited at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. under the title The Migration Series. A two-year tour follows, accompanied by a multiauthor catalogue edited by Elizabeth Hutton Turner. Exhibition receives tremendous critical response nationwide. Time magazine critic Robert Hughes remarks that the paintings “constitute the first, and arguably the best treatment of black American historical experience by a black artist” and that “they are of far greater power than almost all the acreage of WPA murals that preceded them in the 1930s.”

1994

  • Catalogue raisonné of prints is published by the Francine Seders Gallery and accompanies a nationally traveling exhibition organized by the Bellevue Art Museum, Washington. Peter Nesbett begins preliminary research for a catalogue raisonné of paintings, drawings, and murals.

1995

  • Sells house and moves with Knight Lawrence to an apartment in downtown Seattle. Sets up a studio in an adjoining apartment.

1996

  • Solo exhibitions, Jacob Lawrence: The Hiroshima Paintings, at the Tyler Museum of Art, Texas, After Vesalius: Drawings by Jacob Lawrence, at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, and Jacob Lawrence: Drawings, 1945 to 1996, at DC Moore Gallery, New York.
  • Receives honorary doctorates from Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts, and Seattle University and the Algur H. Meadows Award from Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

1997

  • The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture included in Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance, which opens at the Hayward Gallery, London, and travels to five other venues in England and the United States.
  • Receives awards from the American Civil Liberties Union, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle, and New York Artists Equity.

1999

  • Completes 12 paintings on the games theme.
  • Receives Lifetime Achievement Award from the Americans for the Arts and the 6th Annual Golden Umbrella Award and Mayor’s Master Artist Award, Seattle.
  • In December, establishes the Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation to promote the creation, exhibition, and study of American Art.

2000s

June 9, 2000

  • Jacob Lawrence dies in his home at age 82.