Jacob Lawrence: The Harlem Renaissance

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Harlem Renaissance According to www.PBS.org The Harlem Renaissance was a name given to the cultural, social, and artistic explosion that took place in Harlem between the end of World War I and the middle of the 1930s. During this period Harlem was a cultural center, drawing black writers, artists, musicians, photographers, poets, and scholars. Many had come from the South, fleeing its oppressive caste system in order to find a place where they could freely express their talents. The Renaissance was more than a literary movement: It involved racial pride, fueled in part by the militancy of the "New Negro" demanding civil and political rights. An important person during the Harlem Renaissance was an artist named Jacob Lawrence. He is one considered one of the greatest painters of modern history. His best known paintings are his paintings based on Harriet Tubman and the Great Migration. For in his paintings he includes his emotions during the great migration. When African-Americans started to flee to urban north in look for jobs and get out of the rural south and the Jim Crow Laws. In the 1930's there was two main art groups, realism art and abstractionism art, but Lawrence rejected both of them and made …show more content…

He became the first African-American to be represented by a New York gallery. His entire collection on The Great Migration was purchased jointly by the Museum of Modern Art and the Phillips Collection. The History of this person is important because without his painting of The Great Migration people like us today wouldn’t be able to put a strong picture together about the migration of African-Americans to the North. The paintings show us the hardship that they faced in the South moving to the North. For the African American migrating from the south, didn’t know what to expect moving North as shown in the picture

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