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Details / Information for Confrontation on the Bridge

Confrontation on the Bridge

1975
(American, 1917–2000)
America
screenprint
Sheet: 49.5 x 66 cm (19 1/2 x 26 in.)
Anne Elizabeth Wilson Memorial Fund 1994.17
© The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Catalogue raisonné: Nesbett L75-2
Location: not on view
Copyright
This artwork is known to be under copyright.

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Description

When Jacob Lawrence was commissioned to execute a print to celebrate the United States' bicentennial in 1976, he illustrated the March 7, 1965, march by unarmed protesters objecting to the denial of African Americans' right to vote. The march began in Selma, Alabama, but before the 600 protesters could reach the state capital in Montgomery, law enforcement officials attacked them with clubs and tear gas as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge; Lawrence symbolized the malicious and brutal attack by including the vicious dog at the left edge of the scene. Two days later, with court protection, Martin Luther King Jr. led now 25,000 marchers to Montgomery. Outraged by the barbarity of the civil rights struggle, the U.S. Congress passed and President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act later that year. Lawrence's strong colors and compact composition relay the intensity and injustice of the violence inflicted on the peaceful protesters.
Print with solid colored shapes depicting a hoard of abstracted people with medium-dark skin tones crossing a bridge from our right side into the left and facing a similarly abstracted, fangs bared dog. Geometric black and green rectangles create the bridge, while the background, people, and dog, are made of wavy organic red, yellow, blue, black, and white shapes. People's mouths' open, revealing white teeth, the corners of most mouths turned down, some up.

Confrontation on the Bridge

1975

Jacob Lawrence

(American, 1917–2000)
America

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