MUST RUN 11/16

JACOB LAWRENCE’S ‘MIGRATION’ AT STUDIO MUSEUM HARLEM w/2 cuts

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NEW YORK CITY — Celebrated for his paintings, which tell some of the greatest stories in American history, The Studio Museum in Harlem presents “Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series: Selections from The Phillips Collection,” a national traveling exhibition organized by The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., on view through January 6.

This exhibition includes 17 panels from Lawrence’s renowned 60-panel “Migration Series,” portraying the flight of more than six million African Americans from the impoverished communities in the rural South to the industrial cities of the North. The panels depict all stages of the migration — images of movement, family, labor, life, segregation, struggle and hope.

Lawrence’s “Migration Series,” an American epic told through vivid patterns and colors, is a masterpiece of narrative paintings — the first work ever produced on this subject. Capturing racial ruptures of the day, Lawrence chronicles the quest of a people in search of greater economic and social justice. A child of the Great Migration who trained in the community-based Harlem Art Workshops, Lawrence devised a powerful way to tell his stories in alternating rhythms of hardboard panels measuring merely 18 by 12 inches.

Following its installation at The Studio Museum in Harlem, the exhibition will travel to the Mississippi Museum of Art and will reunite with the remaining 13 panels at The Phillips Collection for a culminating exhibition that will celebrate the journey of the series and the American stories it has collected along the way.

The Studio Museum in Harlem is at 144 West 125th Street, between Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard and Lenox Avenue. For more information, www.studiomuseum.org or 212-864-4500.