Shannah Rose

The first African American artist to be represented by a New York gallery, Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) first came to prominence in the Harlem workshops and the Federal Arts Project arm of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s. He is renowned for his epic sixty-panel historical narrative cycle, the Migration Series (1941), which visualizes the causes and consequences of the Great Migration of African Americans from the agrarian South to the industrialized North of the United States during World War I. Unlike the Migration Series, however, little has been written about Lawrence’s last attempt at an historical narrative series of such scope and scale, entitled Struggle… From the History of the American People (1954-56). A series of thirty egg tempera paintings depicting the creation of the United States and its struggle for freedom and democracy, Lawrence envisioned the paintings as a symbol of “man’s constant search for the perfect society in which to live.”  To this date, scholars have treated the Struggle Series only in fragments and as a failed part of the artist’s oeuvre, in part because the thirty panels are dispersed among various institutions.

This project positions Lawrence’s final historical series within the context of its creation, at the onset of a new era in the civil rights movement. Through close examination of archival records from the Archives of American Art and The Phillips Collection, and application of modern narrative theory, this project offers a new approach to reading the Struggle Series as a cohesive narrative cycle, and analyzes the work as in dialogue with - and in opposition to - the grand tradition of history painting.