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Jacob Lawrence ( September 7 , 1917 - June 9 , 2000 ) was an African American Painter ; he was married to fellow artist Gwendolyn Knight . LIFE Lawrence is probably among the best-known twentieth century African American painters, a distinction also shared by Romare Bearden . Lawrence's Migration Series made him nationally famous when it was featured in a 1941 issue of '' Fortune Magazine ''. The series depicts the great move north of blacks in the Depression years. Born in 1917 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Lawrence was thirteen when he moved with his mother, sister and brother to New York City, where she enrolled him in classes at an arts and crafts settlement house in Harlem, in an effort to keep her son busy and have him steer clear of joining a youth gang. The young Lawrence often drew patterns with Crayon s. Although much of his work copied his mother's Carpet s, the art teacher noted great potential in Lawrence. After dropping out of high school at sixteen, Lawrence worked in a laundry and a printing plant and attended classes at the Harlem Art Workshop, taught by his mentor, the African American artist Charles Alston. During the Second World War , Jacob Lawrence enlisted in the United States Navy . Lawrence married Gwendolyn Knight as a young man after receiving a job with the Works Progress Administration where he studied under such notable Harlem Renaissance artists as Charles Alston and Henry Bannarn in the Alston-Bannarn workshop. He finally settled in Seattle, Washington and became an art professor at the University Of Washington where some of his works are now displayed in the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering and in Meany Hall for the Performing Arts. The piece in the main lobby of Meany Hall entitled "Theatre" was commissioned for the hall in 1985. In 1998 he received Washington State's highest honor, The Washington Medal Of Merit . WORK Lawrence was twenty-two years old when his series of paintings of the Haitian general Toussaint L’Ouverture was shown in an exhibit of African American artists at the Baltimore Museum of Art. This impressive work was followed by a series of paintings of the lives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. Lawrence was only twenty-three when he completed the sixty-panel set of narrative paintings entitled Migration of the Negro. The series, a moving portrayal of the migration of hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the rural South to the North after World War I, was shown in New York and brought him national recognition. In the 1940s Lawrence was given his first major solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and became the most celebrated African American painter in the country. In 1974 the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York held a major retrospective of his work, and in 1983 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He taught at several schools, and his work was collected by numerous museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum. Lawrence continued to paint until a few weeks before his death in June 2000 at the age of eighty-two. His last public work, the mosaic mural New York in Transit, was installed in October 2001 in the Times Square subway station in New York City. Lawrence's work often portrayed important periods in African-American history. Among his works are a series of pieces about the Abolitionist John Brown and another about Haiti an revolutionary Toussaint L'Ouverture , as well as numerous depictions of Harriet Tubman . He was awarded the US National Medal of the Arts in 1990. The overall aim of his paintings were to give blacks reason to have pride, a sense of accomplishment, and hope for their future. Jacob Lawrence was honored as an artist, teacher, and humanitarian when the NAACP awarded him the Spingarn Medal in 1970 for his outstanding achievements. One work that depicted Lawrence was a photograph of himself in an art museum looking at one of his own paintings on display where he is wearing his full dress uniform as a Navy Seaman . Throughout his lengthy artistic career, Lawrence concentrated on depicting the history and struggles of African American. SOURCES
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