The Migration Series

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 Julius Rosenwald Fund.

Jacob Lawrence painted The Migration Series in 1941, telling a story through tempera paint about the Migration of African Americans migrating to the North during the 1910’s. It has been praised by many as being well thought out, researched, and doing the Black narrative justice. The Migration Series is truly a spectacular work, holding 60 12 x 18in panels worth of narrative that tells history in an understandable platform. This is Jacob Lawrence’s most famous piece, as it was immediately and still is, displayed in both the Philips Collection as well as the Museum of Modern Art since 1941. Thanks to its notoriety this piece is most certainly a part of Lawrence’s legacy. 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 images and words that tells the story of the Great Migration. The impact is almost that of a comic book, which Lawrence was deeply inspired by.