Jacob Lawrence, American, 1917-2000
The migration gained in momentum, 1941
Lawrence was born in New Jersey and raised in Harlem, experiencing the Harlem Renaissance, but he was the child of two migrant parents who took part in the internal Great Migration following the U.S. Civil War, an experience that Lawrence recaptures through a series of paintings, of which this is the first. While climate disasters are increasingly the impetus for internal displacement in the US, the communities that are most at-risk have remained the same since the Great Migration. They experience these risks now as the result of ongoing discriminatory practices that have been in place since before the Great Migration, and in the communities that received them after the migration. The nearly monochrome environment the migrants travel through in this piece is likely meant to evoke a lack of safety in their original environment, and as climate migration grows more prevalent this gray space only gains more meanings—the ash-coated aftermath of a fire, or the muddy waters of a flood. Label by Frank Kennedy