“What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue?”1

“O homes were very decorative, full of...pattern... color....The people used this as a means of brightening their life,” said Jacob Lawrence, attributing his love of vibrant color design to his youth in Harlem (1). When asked if anyone in his family was artistically inclined, he would say no, “It’s only in retrospect that I realized I was surrounded by art. You’d walk Seventh Avenue and look in the windows and you’d see all these colors in the depths of the Depression, all these colors!” (1). “Most of my work depicts events from the many Harlems that exist throughout the United States. This is my genre. My surroundings. The people I know...the happiness, tragedies, and the sorrows of mankind...” (2). Lawrence was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, “But I know nothing about it,” he always said, because his family soon moved, to Pennsylvania (3). He moved again in his early teens, with his mother, after his parents separated. “And we came to New York and of course this was a completely new visual experience” (3). Lawrence showed artistic talent at an early age. “I liked design....I used to do things like rugs by seeing the pattern...in very bright primary and secondary colors...and papier-mâché masks...not for play or anything...I just liked to make them....My fi rst exposure to art which I didn’t realize was even art at the time was at an after-school settlement house....The Utopia Children’s Settlement House” (3). “I never saw an art gallery until I was about eighteen years of age.... And going to the settlement house I was exposed to arts and crafts; soap carving, leather work, woodwork and painting...” (3). In the early 1930s, Depression relief programs sprang up all over the United States. Lawrence met Augusta Savage, already a well-known sculptor, at a center across the street from where he lived. He met writers Alain Locke, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison and worked with many prominent artists of the day, Norman Lewis, Charles Alston, Romare Bearden, Henry Bannarn. Encouraged by Augusta Savage, he participated in the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Arts Project, a program founded in 1935 to create jobs in the arts, “...[I]t was like a very informal schooling. You were able to ask