Jacob Lawrence

Title: Story Painter, The Life of Jacob Lawrence
Author: John Duggleby
Illustrator: (All works of art by Jacob Lawrence)
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Copyright: 1998
ISBN: 0-8118-2082-3
Genre: Biography
Library Location: Amarillo Public Library

“Some people may hate me for holding up a mirror,
but I can’t drop it.” Jacob Lawrence



Summary: Story Painter, The life of Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), tells the story of one of America’s greatest artists, an African-American who brought attention to the social plight of blacks living in the United States through his artwork. Lawrence spent most of his growing-up years in the energetic community of Harlem in New York City, where his mother enrolled him in an after-school program at Utopia Children’s House to keep him from joining a gang. There he became fascinated with painting rich, solid colors in tempera, and his paintings were soon highly praised in the community. However, his shows in Harlem made him no money during the great depression, so he took a job with a government program building public works projects until he was old enough to qualify to work for the Easel Project, a government program created to provide work for artists. While working for the Easel Project, Jacob labored in his spare time creating a large series of paintings in celebration of Touissaint L’Ouverture, the first Black hero Lawrence learned about. Jacob’s supporters arranged for this series to be shown in museums in Chicago and Baltimore, and soon he honored two other black heroes, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass with their own series of paintings. Lawrence went on to work as a famous artist for five decades, teaching in universities and highlighting social inequalities towards blacks in the U.S. through his paintings.

Personal Response: Although I’m familiar with the work of Jacob Lawrence and have personally viewed a museum show of his work, I didn’t know the details of his life story before reading this book. I was very impressed with Lawrence and found him to be an excellent role model for any young person and especially for African-American students. His persistence, hard work, generosity, talent and humility are only a few of the qualities of this fine man that are brought to light in this book for older school students. In addition, Story Painter contains numerous beautiful full-page color reproductions that allow the reader to view a broad spectrum of the artist’s work.

Suggested Use in the Classroom: Lawrence’s paintings contain simple and strong design elements of shape and color, and derive their visual impact from strong value contrasts as well. I would discuss with my class how Jacob’s strong compositions correlate with the important social message he wishes to convey to form a powerful and unified visual statement. After discussing Jacob Lawrence’s life and work and reviewing principles of good design, individual students could create hard-edged acrylic paintings, either representational or not, using some of the elements of design found in this great painter’s work. Upon completion of these paintings, students could constructively critique the pieces produced in our class.