Customs House Museum & Cultural Center presents Jacob Lawrence: Three Series of Prints

CLARKSVILLE, TN – The Customs House Museum & Cultural Center celebrates renowned African American artist Jacob Lawrence with 26 of his color prints, on view now in the Crouch Gallery. The exhibition was curated by Peter Nesbett, editor of Jacob Lawrence: The Complete Prints (1963-2000), A Catalogue Raisonné, and founding director of the Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation.

Lawrence was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1917 and passed his formative years in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood. In the mid-1930s, he took art classes sponsored by the College Art Association and the WPA at the Harlem Community Art Center and, following a two-year scholarship to the American Artists School, worked in the easel division of the Federal Art Project. In 1941, Lawrence became the first African American artist included in the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where he had a one-man exhibition in 1944.

Since his first published print in 1963, Jacob Lawrence has produced a body of prints that is both highly dramatic and intensely personal. In his graphic work, as in his paintings, Lawrence has turned to the lessons of history and to his own experience. From depictions of civil rights confrontations to scenes of daily life, these images present a vision of a common struggle toward unity and equality, a universal struggle deeply seated in the depths of the human consciousness.

Jacob Lawrence received numerous awards and honors, including the National Medal of Arts (1990), the NAACP Annual Great Black Artists Award (1988) and the Spingarn Medal (1970). His work has been the subject of several major retrospectives that have traveled nationally, originating in 1986 at Seattle Art Museum, in 1974 at the Whitney Museum of American Art and in 1960 at the Brooklyn Museum.

The works in the exhibition come from the collection of Alitash Kebede of Los Angeles. Kebede was a friend and associate of Jacob Lawrence. The exhibition and national museum tour were organized by Landau Traveling Exhibitions of Los Angeles. Landau Traveling Exhibitions organizes and circulates exhibitions to and for museums, universities, foundations and private collections. Over the past 40 years, they have presented more than five hundred exhibitions at museums throughout North America and the world, and now you can find Jacob Lawrence: Three Series of Prints on display at the Customs House Museum & Cultural Center through December 31.

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