“The significance of a project such as this rests, I think, on its educational value.” So Jacob Lawrence wrote in the outline for his Migration Series before he started work on it in 1940. His goal, he wrote, was for Americans, black and otherwise, to learn something about the historical movement known as The Great Migration, when blacks from the South moved North in great numbers during the years following World War I. The Phillip’s current exhibition of the series he eventually painted underscores the difference between art and education, between portraying information and conveying feeling, between a timeline and a story. Even if he set out to educate, Lawrence also produced amazing works of art.
The Philips Collection owns half of the 60 panel series, (the even numbered panels are owned by the Museum of Modern Art), and, justifiably proud of what they have, they have mounted a very thorough exhibit. In addition to the panels, there is a video of Lawrence, a collection of reactions to the piece from newspapers when it first came out, a variety of photos and documents from his life, and, somewhat improbably, a computer kiosk where you can tell your own migration story and send individual panels to your friends through email.
Naturally, the real highlight of the exhibit is the panels themselves. The pictorial story contains fragments of history familiar to any student—strike breakers, labor riots, war shortages, and discrimination, but the dry informational captions—the first one is “During World War I there as a great migration North by Southern African-Americans”—take on the heaviness of mythology through these evocative paintings. Lawrence used poster paints and brown paper to save money, a choice that gave his work a gravitas despite, or maybe because of its workmanlike materials. Colors were painted simultaneously on all the panels, and each different hue was applied to the various panels at the same time. Reds and yellows follow throughout, as if it’s the same people recurring throughout the story.
The panels form a story and a world that feels organic and primal, with the haunting echoes that come from, for instance, the empty space in painting #10, captioned “They were very poor,” showing two black people sitting at a table with empty bowls. The spaces between people, the haunting blank faces, the simple lines, the repeated colors, all contribute to a sense of great changes, and of weighty events.
These are simple paintings, but you can see the thoughts behind them, the decisions made by these blank-faced individuals. The Migration Series contains a lot of information, yes, but what sticks with you is a lingering feeling. Don’t miss it.
