The Migration Series, originally titled The Migration of the Negro, is a group of paintings by African-American painter Jacob Lawrence which depicts the migration of African Americans to the northern United States from the South that began in the 1910s. It was published in 1941 and funded by the WPA.
Contents
Lawrence conceived of the series as a single work rather than individual paintings, and worked on all of the paintings at the same time, in order to give them a unified feel and to keep the colors uniform between panels. He wrote sentence-long captions for each of the sixty paintings explaining aspects of the event. Viewed in its entirety, the series creates a narrative, in both images and words that tells the story of the Great Migration.
Background
Lawrence moved to Harlem when he was thirteen years old, having lived previously in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. His mother had been born in Virginia and his father in South Carolina, so he would have been personally familiar with the migration from members of his own family. Lawrence created the sixty paintings in the series in 1940-41 when he was twenty-three years old at the time. He did so with the help of funding from the WPA, one of FDR's New Deal agencies.
The series is based on the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural south to the urban north starting in the 1910s. The early part of the migration ran through 1930 and numbered some 1.6 million people. The panels show the dire state of black life in the South, with poor wages, economic hardship due to the boll weevil, and a justice system rigged against them. The North offered better wages and slightly more rights, although was not without its problems; living conditions were much more crowded in the cities, which led to new threats such as tuberculosis outbreaks. The final panel notes that the migration continues; in this, Lawrence was correct, as African-Americans continued to leave the South in number in the 1950s and 60s as well.
The series was collected and exhibited in Washington D.C. in 1993 and retitled from "The Migration of the Negro" to "The Migration Series", and almost all of the captions were rewritten. Notably, negro, a neutral term in 1941, had since fallen out of favor. Most of the new captions were shorter and use either "black" or "African-American".
Technique
The works consist of casein tempera paint applied to hardboard panels, atop a traditional gesso layer of rabbit-skin glue and whiting. Lawrence made his own casein tempera, purchasing the dry pigments from Fedanzie Sperrle and using them unmixed so that the colors would not vary between panels. With the panels laid out, he worked systematically to apply one color to each, starting with black and moving on to the lighter colors.
Lawrence was influenced by Mexican muralism of the 1920s-40s, and The Migration Series is something of an American offshoot of the school.
Ownership
The sixty panels are shared between MoMA in New York and the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, a split that happened in 1942. Each has thirty panels, except when the collection is on loan (usually as a unified group).