Fulton and Nostrand
1958
Jacob Lawrence
(American, 1917–2000)
America
See Also
Videos
The Composition of the Painting
All Walks of Life
The Artist, Jacob Lawrence
Lawrence's Process
Visually Similar by AI
CMA Store
American Struggle: Teens Respond to Jacob Lawrence
by Peabody Essex Museum "A fresh lens for viewing Jacob Lawrence's art: through the perspective of teens of color... An invaluable resource amplifying marginalized teen voices and conveying Lawrence's relevance to their own lives." ―Kirkus Reviews In the mid-1950s, as Brown v. Board of Education felled the ideology of “separate but equal,” the great African American artist Jacob Lawrence saw the need for a version of American history that reckoned with its complexities and contradictions yet was shared by all its citizens. The result was his monumental work Struggle. . . from the History of the American People. Lawrence, the best known black American artist of the 20th century, developed the series of thirty panels, each measuring 12 × 16 inches, over the course of two years. Lawrence created the panels as history you could hold in your hands and intended to reproduce the images in a book that he never realized. The paintings depict signal moments in the American Revolution and the early decades of the American republic, and feature the words and actions of founding fathers, enslaved people, women, and Native Americans. In January 2020, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, is mounting the landmark exhibition, Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle. The show, which unites the panels in one place for the first time in nearly half a century, then travels to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., on a two-year national tour. In the spirit of Lawrence’s project, this collection includes brief interpretive texts written by teens in response to the Struggle series. This illustrated book features a chorus of thirty singular young adult voices expressing how Lawrence and his Struggle series speaks to them on a personal, emotional level. The young writers come from a broad variety of races and ethnicities, nationalities, religions, genders, sexualities, and abilities, and underrepresented voices. As Jacob Lawrence mined American history to reflect upon events, he saw happening around him in segregation-era America, these young adults use these panels to comment on their experiences in today’s America. 200 pages Published January 21, 2020
Collusions of Fact and Fiction
by Ilka Saal Collusions of Fact and Fiction traces a generational shift in late twentieth-century African American cultural engagements with the history and legacies of transatlantic slavery. With a focus on works by playwright Suzan-Lori Parks and visual artist Kara Walker, the book explores how, in comparison to the first wave of neo-slave narratives of the 1970s and 1980s, artists of the 1990s and early 2000s tend to approach the past from the vantage point of a liberal entanglement of fact and fiction as well as a highly playful, often humorous, and sometimes irreverent signifying on entrenched motifs, iconographies, and historiographies. Saal argues that the attempt to reconstruct or recuperate the experience of African Americans under slavery is no longer at stake in the works of artists growing up in the post–Civil Rights era. Instead, they lay bare the discursive dimension of our contemporary understanding of the past, and address the continued impact of its various verbal and visual signs upon contemporary identities. In this manner, Parks and Walker stake out new possibilities for engaging the past and inhabiting the present and future. Published 2021
Albert Bierstadt: Bridal Veil Falls, Yosemite 1000-Piece Jigsaw Puzzle
Albert Bierstadt (American, b. Germany, 1830–1902) Bridal Veil Falls, Yosemite Valley, California, 1871–1873 Albert Bierstadt is best known for his large, grandiose paintings of the American West. Bridal Veil Falls captures the magnificence of the Yosemite Valley—while offering you a challenging but rewarding 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle.
American Gothic • Enamel Pin
1.5" x 1.5" Soft Enamel Pin Double Posted Rubber Clasps Inspired by "American Gothic" by Grant Wood "American Gothic" is a painting by Grant Wood in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Wood's inspiration came from what is now known as the American Gothic House, and his decision to paint the house along with "the kind of people I fancied should live in that house." Painted in 1930, it depicts a farmer standing beside a woman that has been interpreted to be either his wife or his daughter. The figures were modeled by Wood's sister, Nan Wood Graham, and Wood and Graham's dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby. The woman is dressed in a colonial print apron evoking 19th-century Americana, and the man is holding a pitchfork. The plants on the porch of the house are mother-in-law's tongue and beefsteak begonia, which are the same plants as in Wood's 1929 portrait of his mother, Woman with Plants. Comes packaged with Pin Museum branded backer card, and a protective polybag.
Contact us
The information about this object, including provenance, may not be currently accurate. If you notice a mistake or have additional information about this object, please email collectionsdata@clevelandart.org.
To request more information about this object, study images, or bibliography, contact the Ingalls Library Reference Desk.
All images and data available through Open Access can be downloaded for free. For images not available through Open Access, a detail image, or any image with a color bar, request a digital file from Image Services.