Jacob Lawrence, an African American artist trained in New York City at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, was one of the few painters of his generation to grow up in the black community. Many of his teachers were black artists. His primary teacher was Charles Alston at the Harlem Art Workshop. A social realist painter early in his career, Lawrence found the subject for much of his work in black history and through his observations of daily life. Born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Lawrence grew up in Harlem, in New York City, which provided material for many of his paintings. Lawrence often painted in series, such as his famous The Migration of the Negro, comprising 60 paintings. This series made the 24-year-old Lawrence an immediate success. Lawrence became one of America’s most honored painters. He had exhibits in major museums, received honorary doctorates, won prizes and foundations grants, and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Council of the Arts and the National Academy of Design. In 1990, President George Bush gave Lawrence a National Medal of Arts. Lawrence attributed his success to his heritage. From his early years, he chronicled his personal experience as a black man and the historical struggles of African Americans in his paintings of slave revolts, ghetto life, discrimination, and the devastation of war. Lawrence’s paintings mix humor with adversity and offer hope for the future of African Americans.

The Birth, a Depression-era scene of a tenement house in Harlem, exemplifies Lawrence’s interest in depicting African American history and contemporary life. Here, the artist used flat, simplified forms and geometric patterns derived from Cubism. Lawrence’s small format presents the viewer with an intimate picture of the overcrowded conditions in the tenement houses and the poverty of its inhabitants.

Nesbitt, Peter T. The Complete Jacob Lawrence. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000.

Wheat, Ellen Harkin. Jacob Lawrence: American Painter. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000, reprinted from 1986 original.

Jacob Lawrence, an African American artist trained in New York City at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, was one of the few painters of his generation who grew up in the black community and was taught primarily by black artists; his primary teacher was Charles Alston at the Harlem Art Workshop. A Social Realist painter early in his career, Lawrence found the subjects for much of his work in black history and in observations of daily life.

The Birth is a Depression-era image set in a Harlem tenement. A man rests his head on a pregnant woman's protruding stomach, while another male figure appears to be assisting in the birth of her baby. Unconcerned with the impending event, the figure on the right prepares to leave the apartment. Lawrence presents an intimate but unsentimental picture of poverty and overcrowded conditions in the slums. Painted in 1938 when he was just twenty-one years old, The Birth was created in the same year in which Lawrence completed the forty-one paintings of the Toussaint L'Ouverture series, his famous pictorial history of the Haitian revolution, which in 1804 established the first black republic in the western hemisphere.

If at times my productions do not express the conventionally beautiful, there is always an effort to express the universal beauty of man's continuous struggle to lift his social position and to add dimension to his spiritual being.
-Jacob Lawrence, 1984