DESCRIPTION
ANALYSIS
Artists’ Stories
Fifth Grade
Lesson 6
INTERPRETATION
EVALUATION
Aaron Douglas, Jacob
Lawrence & the Harlem
Renaissance
Objectives: At the end of the lesson, students will be able to,
1) Tell two interesting facts about Lawrence’s life that impacted his artmaking
2) Describe the idea of a series in art
3) Discuss the influence of Aaron Douglas and the Harlem Renaissance on
Lawrence’s work
Key Questions:
Why is the World Series called a series?
How is Harry Potter a series? How is your favorite television show a series?
What is a series?
What are some other series you know of?
What do you think a series of paintings would be?
What is the story this series is telling?
Does it matter that these paintings are a part of a series? Why or why not?
How do the paintings relate to each other?
What evidence do you see of Aaron Douglas’s influence (and the Harlem
Renaissance’s influence) in Lawrence’s work?
What similarities do you see in the paintings?
What different points of view has Lawrence depicted?
Based on these two images, what do you think some of the other 28 images
in this series look like?
Why do you think an artist would choose to work in series of artworks?
Jacob Lawrence
 Born 1917, died 2000
 Became highly influenced by Harlem Renaissance artists after moving to Harlem
and had his first solo show there at age 20.
 Despite his enormous fame, he suffered severe depression because of lack of
recognition from colleagues. Received psychological treatment.
 Received many awards and honors during his lifetime including a retrospective at
New York’s Whitney Museum in 1974.
Carpenters, 1977
Lesson Cycle
Focus: (5 min.) Why is the World Series called a series? How is Harry Potter a
series? How is your favorite television show a series? What is a series?
What are some other series you know of?
Tell students that today they will be looking at an artist who painted series of
paintings. What do you think a series of paintings would be? (a group of
paintings pertaining to a similar topic or time frame)
Guide the Group: (15 min.) Ask students to look at a series of paintings by Aaron
Douglas, an African American painter who was painting in series, telling the
story of black experience in Harlem when Jacob Lawrence arrived in Harlem.
Douglas created his best-known mural series, titled Aspects of Negro Life, in
1934. What do you think the story is in this series?
(BACKGROUND INFORMATION FOR USE DURING DISCUSSION)
Harlem Renaissance--- A major factor leading to the rise of the Harlem Renaissance was
the migration of African-Americans to the northern cities. Between 1919 and 1926, large
numbers of black Americans left their rural southern states homes to move to urban centers
such as New York City, Chicago, and Washington, DC. The intellectual and social freedom of
the era triggered a widespread migration of Black Americans from the rural south to the
industrial centers of the north - and especially to New York City.
The Harlem Renaissance was a flowering of African-American social thought which was
expressed through the visual arts, as well as through music (Louis Armstrong, Eubie Blake,
Fats Waller and Billie Holiday), dance (Josephine Baker), theater (Paul Robeson) and
literature (Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and W.E.B. DuBois). Centered in the
Harlem district of New York City, the New Negro Movement (as it was called at the time) had
a profound influence across the Unites States and even around the world.
Aaron Douglas (1898-1979) & Aspects of Negro Life (1934): Born in Kansas in 1898,
Douglas received a BA in art from the University of Nebraska. Douglas taught art in Kansas
City for a few years until he decided to pursue a career as an artist and headed to New York
to earn his MA from Columbia University. Douglas studied with an illustrator from Germany,
who encouraged him to look to African art and themes for inspiration in his work. Douglas
soon began integrating African design in his work, which caught the attention of Alain Locke.
Douglas designed and illustrated Alain Locke's "The New Negro.”
In 1928, Douglas became the first president of the Harlem Artists Guild, which was
successful in helping African American artists obtain projects under the Works Progress
Administration. In 1940 he moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where he founded the Art
Department at Fisk University and taught for 29 years. Douglas earned a Master's Degree in
art education from Columbia University in New York in 1944 and returned to Fisk
permanently. He lectured and painted until his death in 1979.
In his paintings, a unique technique Douglas created-which later became his signature mural
style-was a series of concentric circles radiating out from some focal point. The color in all of
Fifth Grade
Lesson 6, page 2
the figures and objects that intersect those circles becomes altered in shade. One figure
might have several shades of the same color. Douglas was greatly influenced by African
ancestral and sculptural art. He used the imagery of this art in his own drawings and murals
to link African Americans to their African heritage.
One of Aaron Douglas's most famous works, Aspects of Negro Life, was painted in 1934. It is
a series of four compositions, the first called The Negro in an African Setting. This painting
celebrates the heritage of African Americans through representations of African dance and
music. The series ends with Song of the Towers, which portrays three major time periods in
African American history: the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Great
Depression.
Does it matter that these paintings are a part of a series? Why or why not?
Next have students look at three images from Lawrence’s Migration Series (a series
of 60 paintings).
(BACKGROUND INFORMATION FOR USE DURING DISCUSSION)
Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series
In 1940 Jacob Lawrence received a $1,500 fellowship from the Rosenwald Foundation to
complete a series of panels on the Great Migration, African-Americans’ movement from the rural
South to the urban North during and after World War I. Lawrence conducted research at The
Schomburg Collection in Harlem and completed the series in 1941.
The Great Migration was the largest movement of black people since slavery removed Africans
to the Americas. Lawrence’s sixty panels portray the story of people seeking a better life. The
captions for each image combine history, sociology, and poetry in a visual narrative.
The railroad is the link in the series of events that comprise Lawrence’s epic story. The narrative
cycle begins and ends with images of a train station. In the first panel, African Americans
embark on their journey from the South to the North, through time and geography, conflict and
hope. Scenes of the train station are repeated throughout the series ending with the text "And
the migrants kept coming."
In the first half of the series, the South is depicted as a bleak, rustic landscape where social
inequities and injustice prevail–poverty, hunger, segregation, lynching, and discrimination are
commonplace facts of life. Some scenes are portrayed as if seen from a moving train; the North
appears only as names of train destinations.
In contrast to the environment of the South, the second half of the narrative depicts the
buildings, people, and industry of the urban North. The final section of The Migration Series
focuses on the new African-American communities of the North–the positive effects of improved
social conditions as well as the ensuing conflicts of overcrowding and race riots.
What similarities do you see in the paintings?
What different points of view has Lawrence depicted?
Fifth Grade
Lesson 6, page 3
Independent Practice: (15 min) Show students images from the Harriet Tubman
Series. In groups ask students: Based on these two images, what do you think
some of the other 28 images in this series look like?
Hand students a brief biography of Harriet Tubman (located in AALC files). In
groups of 4, have students use some of the previously discussed stylistic
components and Tubman’s biography to sketch out what they believe might be
an additional panel in the series. Also students should write a caption describing
their contribution to the series as Lawrence always did. Save time to share
these ideas with the whole class.
Art Activity: (10 min.) Have students think of an important event in their life. Then
have them think of a stack of 10 photos from that event that were maybe taken
by different family members or friends.
Have students divide a piece of paper into 3 sections to sketch using bright
markers what three of the photos from the event would have looked like. Like
Lawrence, these drawings would be part of a series of 10 paintings about their
important life event.
Ask students to consider:
What stylistic aspects would the series have in common?
What would be different in each painting?
Closure: (5 min.)
Ask the EVALUATION QUESTION: Why do you think an artist
would choose to work in series of artworks?
Student responses could include that artists can explore one topic from many
different perspectives by limiting and grouping work along a theme or event.
This allows for deeper exploration of the topic, rather than a broad surface
representation of ideas.
Fifth Grade
Lesson 6, page 4
Lesson Resources
Jacob Lawrence Time Line
September 17, 1917 Jacob Lawrence’s birthday.
1930 Moves to Harlem with his siblings and mother and is highly influenced
by Harlem Renaissance artists.
1932-34 Lawrence studies art at the Harlem Art Workshop.
1938 Has his first one-man show at the Harlem YMCA.
1948 Exhibited the Migration series at the Eighth Annual Exhibition of the Art
Institute of Chicago and was awarded a silver medal.
.Paints The Wedding.
1949 Completed a series entitled Hospital, consisting of 11 panels during his
stay at Hillside Hospital.
1957 Paints The Street.
1974 Honored with a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of
American Art.
1986 Honored with another retrospective at the Seattle Art Museum.
1977 Paints Carpenters.
June 9, 2000 Jacob Lawrence dies at the age of 83.
Fifth Grade
Lesson 6, page 5
Jacob A. Lawrence was the eldest of three children born to Jacob and Rosa Lee
Lawrence on September 17, 1917, in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Lawrence's father
worked as a railroad cook and as a coal miner while his mother was employed as a
domestic worker. He moved to Harlem with his siblings and mother in the early
1930s.
Lawrence’s artistic abilities were evident by age 12 when he began taking art
classes in an after school program. His first projects consisted of abstract drawings
based on decorative patterns and designs observed in his home, and papier-mache
masks and cardboard dioramas using crayons and poster paints. Lawrence
continued to study art as a teenager in Harlem at the Harlem Art Workshop between
1932 and 1934.
Lawrence was given his first one-man show in February of 1938, at the age of 20, at
the YMCA in Harlem. The artist’s debut of his genre paintings of Harlem depicted
street and interior scenes done in 1936-37. In 1941 Lawrence married Gwendolyn
Knight, whom the artist met as a teenager in Harlem. Soon after, Fortune magazine
commissioned the artist to do a series of ten paintings on postwar conditions in the
South. In 1948 the artist exhibited the Migration series at the Eighth Annual
Exhibition of the Art Institute of Chicago and was awarded a silver medal.
Lawrence became psychologically depressed during the late 1940s due to his
enormous success and the lack of recognition of his colleagues. Finally, in July of
1949, Lawrence committed himself to Hillside Hospital in Queens, New York, to
receive treatment for depression. During his stay from 1949 until 1950, the artist
completed a series entitled Hospital, consisting of 11 panels. Lawrence actively
resumed painting after his recovery.
Lawrence has received numerous awards during his career, including the National
Medal of Arts, presented by President George Bush in 1990. He was honored with a
major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974 and again at the
Seattle Art Museum in 1986.
Throughout his lifetime, Lawrence experienced the Harlem Renaissance, survived
the Depression, served in World War II, experienced postwar reconstruction and the
Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and his lifetime nearly
spanned the century. Jacob Lawrence has been proclaimed by critics as the
definitive translator of the history of the African American experience through art.
Jacob Lawrence died at the age of 83 on June 9, 2000.
Fifth Grade
Lesson 6, page 6
Aaron Douglas
www.pbs.org/wnet/aaworld/ arts/artfocus_03.html
http://www.africana.com/blackboard/bb_art_000035.htm#fea
Jacob Lawrence
http://www.whitney.org/jacoblawrence/art/migration_series.html
The Wedding (1948)
http://www.artic.edu/artaccess/AA_AfAm/pages/AfAm_5.shtml
The Street (1957)
http://www.butlerart.com/pc_book/pages/jacob_lawrence_b.htm
Carpenters (1977)
http://www.artmissoula.org/Collection/Artists/Lawrence/Lawrence1.html
http://www.galegroup.com/free_resources/bhm/bio/lawrence_j.htm
http://www.columbia.edu/itc/history/odonnell/w1010/edit/migration/migration.html
All 60 images from The Migration Series
Information about the Great Migration
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Heights/5881/
http://www.whitney.org/jacoblawrence/art/migration_series.html
www.pbs.org/gointochicago/ migrations/
Information about the Harlem Renaissance
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/history/harlem-renaissance.html
http://www.42explore.com/harlem.htm
Also, please check the St. Francis library for relevant children’s books about Jacob
Lawrence.
Fifth Grade
Lesson 6, page 7