Jacob Lawrence is best known for his The Migration series, a precursor to this work, which launched his career with its exhibition at the Downtown Gallery in NYC (1941). The series portrayed the Great Migration when hundreds of thousands of African Americans moved from the rural South to the urban North after World War I. Because he was working in tempera, which dries rapidly, he planned all the paintings in advance and then applied a single color wherever he was using it across all the scenes to maintain tonal consistency. Only then did he proceed to the next color. With this NYC show, he became the first African American artist to be represented by a major commercial gallery.
Builders (The Family) was produced while he was a Professor of Painting at the University of Washington in Seattle. This print is a later addition to his career-long series of works featuring builders, and it reflects his turn in the 1970s away from more explicit social commentary. From the mid-1940s until the 1990s, the focus of many of Lawrence's paintings and prints was builders. For him, builders served as symbols of man's aspiration— "man building", as he described it. As we can see here, builders are serving not only as symbols for individual building, but a familial and community building as well.
This image was one of 12 thoughtfully selected by UMMA and U-M’s Edward Ginsberg Center staff and faculty for a new interactive Dialogue Deck exercise. Drawing from UMMA’s permanent collection, the Dialogue Deck takes works of art that both directly and indirectly evoke the culture, politics, and history of the USA, and asks you to consider how they make you feel and how they might make others feel. We believe that visual art offers a creative platform for exploring complex and difficult issues. Images help to expand our intellectual and emotional capacities, and offer opportunities to describe the world as we see it and imagine how others might see it differently.
Reflection Prompts:
At the precipice of one of the most highly charged U.S. presidential elections in recent history, UMMA and the Ginsberg Center offer an online, interactive Dialogue Deck exercise as a platform to examine and explore social and political norms, values, and beliefs through shared dialogue and reflection.
These are a sampling of questions taken from the Dialogue Deck, which can be applied to a variety of images. How would you answer them while considering Builders (The Family) above?
- Describe the setting in the artwork. How does the setting inform what this image says about the USA?
- How does this image speak to our country’s past/present/future? Why?
‌
‌
‌
